19: Another Time
by Math Girl
Summary: Dealing with the aftermath of disaster, and the computer scenario. Follows the events of 'There Goes the Neighborhood'. Alternate universe.
1. Chapter 1

_Follows up 'There Goes the Neighborhood', still alternate universe, though, as Darkhelmet points out, tending ever closer to movie-verse. Some edits were made to the previous story's last chapters and epilogue._

Another Time

1

Cindy Taylor had flown to New York City on WNN's nickel, she and Jake both having 'forgotten' that she'd quit.

Times Square was a radioactive no-man's land; neon signs shattered, buses and taxis smashed, the crowds simply… gone. Transferred.

As a gale-force wind shrieked between smoldering skyscrapers, Cindy directed the news copter's pilot to bring them in as close as possible. They had a lot of room to maneuver, at first. Most local air traffic had been grounded, the rest diverted well past the flaring electro-magnetic torch that had been mid-town Manhattan.

International Rescue wasn't present, too busy responding to events in space, below ground and under water to race to the scene of a more accessible disaster. Instead, this job belonged to FDNY, Civil Defense, and New York's finest.

Cindy's re-issued press credentials had allowed the WNN heli-jet, pilot and reporter close enough to look, and far too close for safety. The pilot, Nick Baldeon, zipped in a bit, banking away just as a police-heli cut toward them. It was a crazy, swooping ride. Hand pressed to her mouth, Cindy scarcely noticed. She hadn't spoken much.

Down below, brave men in yellow survival suits put out fires, poking through the charred wreckage of what looked an awful lot like a spaceship. But no-one had come out and said it. Not yet.

Manipulating the twin sticks, Nick banked again, swinging the news copter through a brief, angry squall. The sky was spitting like a frightened cat. Between rolling clouds, glimpsed past the sharpened fingers of Manhattan's abandoned towers, the heavens looked green and cold.

"Cindy," Nick said, raising his voice to be heard above the heli-jet's hissing blades, and the occasional staticky radio burst, "Fuel's gettin' low, Babe. There ain't nowhere safe to land any closer 'n Queens. We gotta go."

She wasn't listening. Voice rock-steady, quite unaware that there were tears sliding from her dark eyes, Cindy said,

"Take us along 42nd Street. As close as you can, Nick. There… just past the Virgin Building…. I think that's the prow."

…where the ship's name had been painted. Surely, _surely_ there were survivors. For five families who desperately needed good news, and for Scott's sake, she hoped so.

The heli-jet swayed and juddered, battered by updrafts and radiation. Nick did his best to keep her level while zipping through a network of urban canyons, his brown eyes focused far ahead of their position. Light poles, billboards, other heli-jets… downright unhealthy neighborhood these days, Manhattan.

Blackened, split and sparking, the corpse of a space ship shot past beneath them. Those parts not somehow melded with the Tower Building, anyway. Once again, police copters swooped in, attempting to drive Cindy and her pilot away from the wreck.

Not before she saw the yellow-suited figures lower something from the flight deck in a metal stretcher. Something sheeted.

Nick glanced over at the silent reporter. Working in a different region, he encountered Cindy Taylor only a few times a year. Like everyone else in the business, though, he knew that she'd been close to one of the astronauts. The tears had dried up, but her face was terribly pale.

All at once, he depressed a pedal and pushed the right stick, sending his bird into a swift, darting climb.

"Time to go home," the pilot announced.

_Many years earlier, Princeton University-_

Amid ancient, carven stone, ivy-draped gates and big old trees, all the well-heeled students and their proud professors, the pair made a jaw-dropping contrast. One skinny, blond and young, dressed like a bass player in the world's least successful grunge band. The other a big, silver-haired old cowboy with a wind-chapped face and work roughened hands, his clothing older than some of the students.

Freshman registration had begun, and the two were making their way through a maze of lawns and courtyards and car parks, to the student administration building.

"Thought you was going t' get that cut," Grant Tracy remarked, as his 16 year-old grandson pushed a lock of wind-whipped hair from his eyes. The man's voice was deep and gravelly, made as smoky as lapsang tea by uncounted hordes of cigarettes.

"I did, Sir," the boy replied quietly, not looking up. "This one."

And he selected a single, silvery-pale strand which was, indeed, somewhat shorter than the rest. Then,

"You want me to cut another?"

Grant made a sound, halfway between a snort and an aggravated sigh. Folk drifted past, intent on business of their own. Ahead of them loomed the admin building, grey and solid against the cloud-flecked autumn sky.

"You sure this is what you want, Boy?"

John hesitated. Somewhere deep inside, with the rest of the junk, he was both terribly excited, and scared as hell. School, in his experience, had never yet been a good thing. Just a dumping ground, someplace he'd been left once his mother died, and the home lessons ceased. A chaos of classes and bells and other students, few of whom he'd known. At least, there'd been brothers… Here, he'd be alone. But, maybe that was the point. To get away. To start again.

"Yes, Sir. I'm sure."

They started up the steps, John briefly distracted by the rough, gritty feel of the cool stone balustrade beneath his left hand; by the individual sparkle of mineral crystals in the densely grained rock.

He had to work very hard, sometimes, to see the whole picture, instead of its fragmented bits.

"Not too late to change your mind, switch to UW, is all I'm sayin'," the old man continued blithely. "There's a passel of horses and an old woman I know of, 'ud be a sight happier if you was closer to home."

John glanced up at his grandfather, ignoring the ice-pale hair (less a few truncated strands) that blew across his own face. The old man said nothing further, though, made no direct order that he'd just have to find a way around.

So, John merely shook his head. Stubborn, as always. Grant clapped a big hand to his grandson's shoulder, feeling a lot of sharp, skinny angles beneath the layered clothing.

"Come on, then," he sighed, removing his battered Stetson as they went through the broad doors. "Best we get you settled in."


	2. Chapter 2: Now and Then

_Varda's Servant, your first insight was correct. As for the other one, you'll know shortly after I do. Thanks for writing, and to Darkhelmet, as well forthe letter andreview. It is always nice to hear from friends. _

2

_Tracy Island-_

Brains was too busy working on Scott, at first, to realize the full scope of the chaos his wormhole had unleashed. Under the probing eye of the scanner, Scott Tracy's internals were a ruptured mess. Shock and massive hemorrhaging had already set in. Death would swiftly have followed, had the engineer not intervened with all the force that medical science could muster.

With Scott stretched out on a treatment table, already sedated, Brains injected a load of surgical nanobots and applied a trauma patch. He focused on the steps, on rational choices, swiftly and precisely weighing the consequences of each action rather than dwelling on how they'd come to this pass. Plenty of time for regrets, later, without adding yet another to the tottering stack.

He watched the glowing scanners, monitoring Scott Tracy's vital signs through each dip and flutter, waiting for the young man's condition to stabilize before beginning work on the little dog. By then, it was almost too late.

He had no proper medications for a canine patient, and hated to waste nanobots that might save a human life… but the dog had ingratiated itself, becoming something akin to a family pet. So, with deep misgivings, Hackenbacker injected a load of surgical robots into the terrier, and set to work. The little animal hardly twitched.

As microscopic machines entered its bloodstream, following prostaglandin and cytokine trails to the injured tissues, Brains scuttled over to his computer station. Several minutes later, after opening a downloaded file, he'd learned the basics of canine physiology well enough to reprogram his nanobots.

Outside, matters were equally confusing and urgent. Thunderbird 2's emergency launch shook cliff-side, house and hangar. More disasters were called in, while the weather continued to worsen, rain in fierce squalls lashing at the med lab's windows, wind gusting powerfully enough to blow down several old trees and a radio antenna. Jeff Tracy was upstairs at the desk, fielding calls and directing the rescue work, with his ribs strapped up and a bottle of extra-strength aspirin at his side.

Brains toiled on, moving from Scott to the dog, and then to Gennine Rivers, when Alan's mother stumbled in with Grandma Tracy. The younger woman's radius and ulna had snapped cleanly in half, as though bent suddenly by a very powerful, extremely precise force. Not a compound fracture, fortunately. The skin was unbroken. The limb hung awkwardly, however, and was quite swollen.

As Hackenbacker maneuvered the arm beneath a third scanner (his lab was growing crowded), she winced, breath hissing softly between clenched teeth.

"I'm, ah… I'm s- sorry, Ms. Rivers," Brains apologized, recalling that the broken arm was attached to a woman. "I d- didn't m- mean to, ah… to hurt you."

Gennine gave him a pained, lop-sided little smile. Her blue eyes were huge in a chalk-white face.

"It's all right, Mr. Hackenbacker," she reassured him. "I know you're doing your best."

Grandma Tracy snorted. Bruised and mussed she might be, but the fierce old woman had lost none of her pepper.

"Fine, my wrinkled rump! Your damn arm's broke! Quit trying to make everybody feel better, Gennie-girl!" And then, without a touch of irony, "That's _my_ job!"

She'd suffered a busted collar bone, herself, hauling young Alan out of harm's way, but at her age, bones tended to snap like dried pasta, so she ignored it. Mostly. _(A touch of the old gin-and-white-raisin tonic had never done no harm, yet, that she knew of.)_

The ash-blonde younger woman gave Victoria Tracy a fond smile. She really _did_ feel better; mostly because around Grandma Tracy, unless you were dead, you had no business complaining.

"Yes, Ma'am," Gennine replied, relaxing a little, as Brains' painkiller joined forces with the tonic. "I'll remember that."

A sudden cough and groan from Scott distracted the trio's attention. The two women hadn't realized that he'd been injured, much less how badly.

Grandma Tracy stumped over to have a look, the big brown eyes behind their glasses gone suddenly brittle-hard.

A glance at the med scanners' complicated displays told her next to nothing. She dealt with people, animals, crops, the land itself and weather; very rarely with computers.

"He's gonna pull through," the old woman didn't so much ask, as state.

Brains dared a jerky nod, lank brown hair tumbling across his forehead.

"The p- prognosis is, ah… is improving, M- Mrs. Tracy. The n- nanobots repair, ah… repair damage f- from within, at a level n- not, ah… not possible at even th- the most w- well, ah… well equipped trauma center."

Grandma Tracy said nothing, but her expression sealed up like a bank vault. Face unreadable, she stroked the black hair away from Scott's clammy forehead.

Other times, other losses… of a beloved daughter-in-law, and her own husband (his absence still a constant, bewildering ache), her parents, before that… made it difficult to speak.

Until Scott was up, she and Gennine would take turns sitting at his side, Grandma refusing treatment or painkillers the entire time. If all she could do was to keep watch, then, by God, she'd do it unhampered and clear-eyed.

From Hackenbacker's small office came a sudden, sharp buzzing noise. His cell phone, set to vibrate, was locked in the top right drawer of the metal work bench. It had gone off twice, now, though the desperately busy engineer had had no time to answer the thing. Worried, thinking of his far-off son, Brains dashed to the office and answered the phone.

_Cross Creek, Florida-_

Abruptly blinking in the sunshine, bare toes curling on warm, gritty concrete, she stared across the road at a small food store and garage. She wore a grey, ribbed tank top and black gym shorts, and she smelled of things entirely foreign to Florida. To Earth, even.

Clouds were mounding up in the west, their purple bellies sagging with rain in a blue, blue sky. Around her leaned a hodge-podge of buildings, glass store fronts displaying recycled flea-market junk, battered cans or mongrel puppies for sale. The 2-lane road was pot-holed, the sidewalk weedy, but oddly clean. Not much traffic. Who could afford the gas, around here?

Somewhere nearby, a dog barked as the damp wind brought news of her sudden appearance, and of whence she'd come.

_But… how? Where was everyone else?_

She needed to think... to call someone; but first, to sit down. There was a park bench close by, of the concrete-and-wood-slat variety. An elderly magnolia tree dropped ragged petals and waxy leaves all over it, and a little drifting shade. Before she could move, though, the door (half glass, half plywood) of _'Dan's Get-n-Go'_ creaked open. She heard an electric fan, and a portable TV. Then a small man leaned out, all grey hair and astonishment.

_"Lindy…?" _He called, voice and legs equally rubbery. "That you?"

And, somehow, it was. Toes on concrete, magnolia petal like a curving white shell on one shoulder, staring at an old shop-keeper and an Orange Crush sign, with rain coming on. It was.

_Princeton, New Jersey, much earlier-_

He'd had to register, and to get his class assignments. No freshman dreck; he'd tested well out of all the _'101'_s, rather to the dismay of his advisor (whom John had every intention of never seeing again).

The dorm room he was assigned, and which his grandfather had helped him move into, was in Holder Hall, second floor, facing east. There was a giant larch tree outside, and a broad, rolling lawn.

In that place and time, the remodeled Holder featured double-entry restrooms shared by two units. Card-access, of course, like the room and the dormitory, itself. Not wishing the bother of a roommate, John paid double the usual rate; or Grant did. The old rancher had more than money enough, and knew that his grandson would repay the debt, with interest, as he'd done for the car.

As they carefully placed each color-coded item of clothing, and stocked the small refrigerator, Grant asked,

"Anythin' else you need, before I head back?"

John looked around. He was in a new place, but between them, the boy and old man had managed to arrange the dorm almost exactly like his room at the ranch house. Except for the refrigerator and oddly-placed bathroom door. Those didn't belong, and would take some getting used to. Otherwise… He'd have to purchase a fish tank, and set up the computer, but the blanket was on the bottom bunk, and his posters on the correct walls.

All Princeton lacked were family and horses, and he wasn't sure, really, how much their absence would mean. They weren't dead, or missing, just temporarily set aside. So, why all the drama?

Pick up the phone, and call. What the hell, in the right mood, he might even answer. John shrugged.

"No, Sir. I'm good, thanks."

Grant nodded.

"Okay, then. Let's go check out this here 'eating club'."

"Tiger Inn," John informed him, helpfully.

"Whatever they call it," his grandfather responded, running a big hand through his own hat-mashed silver hair. "Your grandma'll kill me, if I don't report what they're feedin' you, out here. She'll want toknow how often to time them care packages."

There were no cafeterias or Food Courts at Princeton University. Just a selection of proprietary dining co-ops to which students were assigned by fame or lottery. The 'Ivy Club' was the fanciest. John, who had no desire for attention, had avoided Ivy, though his father's wealth and influence could have gotten him in. Instead, the luck of the draw had landed him at Tiger, a much less monied establishment. Suited John Tracy just fine, as he intended to see even less of the Tiger Inn than he did of his advisor, Doctor Lakewood.

A wind stirred the branches of the larch tree outside his window, causing the golden spatters of light on the worn green rug to shift around. Interested, he watched for a bit, then nodded agreement to the food-scouting notion, adding,

"Yes, Sir. I'll buy lunch."

And so they left the room, making occasional short comments about everything… except what really mattered.


	3. Chapter 3: Plan B

_Well, to begin with, I owe Tikatu, Varda's Servant and Agent Five a big thank you for the reviews, and the guesses, some of which may be close to the mark. And, good luck with the national novels (Varda's S- I'll have to go check out your work. It's always cool to find out that someone writes)._

3

_Tracy Island, at the desk-_

With Thunderbird 2 still plucking pilots and mariners from a weirdly restive sea, and Scott in guarded condition, a pair of local operatives had had to be dispatched to Washington to rescue the trapped blackmailer. Banks and Conroy; both Army Reserve, and damn good men. Jeff would have trusted either of them to deliver the company payroll, or his wi… _ex-_wife's… next baby.

As he monitored Virgil's progress and sifted through hundreds of distress calls _(how in Heaven's name did John manage?)_ Jeff kept half an ear tuned to Conroy's coded transmissions.

"Don't know how he can claim to be trapped, Boss," the operative remarked at one point, "the doors down here are _wide_ open, all through the tunnel system. And there aren't any guards, either. Place is deserted."

Then, while a loud thunderclap shook the house, Banks said something that didn't carry over properly. Conroy replied, sounding pensive,

"Yeah. You got a point, there. Boss, the doors aren't just open… it almost looks like they were _blasted_, or something. Only… there's no burns or shrapnel. Just twisted hatches and broken locks."

Before Jeff could answer, another call came through, this one from Sea Base Alpha. _Major structural damage… hundreds trapped… situation critical…_ Yet more trouble. Commander Carlin was requesting immediate assistance from all available vessels.

Raking a hand through his iron-grey hair, painfully twisting his cracked ribs in the process, Jeff responded. He tried to sound reassuring as he promised Alpha's commander that help was on its way. It would have to be quick, though. The central dome was flooding.

"Virgil!" Jeff snapped out, hitting a certain comm switch. But he hadn't a chance to give any orders, for Banks and Conroy called in again.

"Boss…" the older man whispered, face very close to the screen of his comm unit. "I think we're too late, Sir."

And he turned the comm unit, panning its small camera to display the inside of a trashed, darkened survival bunker piled high with junk, in the midst of which slumped the emptied ruin of a man. Surrounded by stained food cartons and dry soda bottles, the dark-haired young fellow _(27 years old? Maybe 30?)_ hummed and giggled to himself, fitting shattered computer parts together with bits of gnawed crust and greasy cardboard.

All at once, he turned his head to regard the comm screen, as though looking straight through the lens at Jeff Tracy. Spectacles broken, face twisted and gloating, the hacker whispered,

"He's coming for you."

_Hackenbacker's medical office-_

He'd wrenched the drawer open and fumbled out his phone, answering just in time to catch the caller. It was his son, Kurt (code-named 'Fermat' since their arrival on the island). Just like the time that his son called to report the release of a viral program, the boy looked deeply worried.

"D- Dad," Fermat began, "We… were only trying t- to… help. W- we wanted to… s- seize and… rep- program the… computer."

Just behind his blue-eyed son, Hackenbacker could make out the pale, concerned faces of his young school friends, Daniel Solomon and Samuel Nakamura. The engineer acknowledged the other boys with a swift nod, but his attention arrowed back to Fermat immediately thereafter.

"I t-take it you, ah… you h- have some i- idea of, ah… of what's h- happened, Son?"

Standing by the office window, as he was, Brains could keep an eye on Scott's med scanners and the injured women. The dog, at the moment, barely registered. Too much else on his mind. But Fermat was nodding agreement. Behind him, one of the other boys whispered,

"It was just a _script! _It wasn't supposed to actually _happen…_"

Fermat shushed his friend, then squared thin little shoulders, and began to explain.

"Wh- when Five… d- dropped out of sight… I thought sh- she… might have… have b- been damaged by… your virus."

The boy paused, evidently thinking through what he ought to say next.

"I thought… she m- might be hiding, so… so I t- told Daniel and S- Sam about… the c- computer, and we… we planned a w- way to… 'catch' and reprogram her. We made up… a s- scenario, like a g- game, to lure Five into… into a containment unit, where sh- she… could then be d- debugged. Only, Daniel did… th- the figures, and it g- got sent… accidentally, Dad, and… then th- there was this h- huge power… surge to r- run it, and…"

Brains had already made the connection.

"What, exactly," he asked, dry-mouthed and slow, "w- was, ah… was _in_ th- that scenario?" Then, cutting off the reply, "Not over th- the phone. I'll n- need a c- copy, Son; secure channel, b- best, ah… best speed."

_Fusi, American Samoa, early evening-_

Mrs. Thorpe, the former Sami Manumaleuga, sat cross-legged in her home, surrounded by friends and family. She was a large woman, dark-skinned and colorfully dressed, with waist-length grey hair braided and coiled atop her head.

There were several small children on her ample lap, Roger's cousins and siblings (in Samoa, children belonged to everybody, and relationships were both deep, and very relaxed). Two entire pandanus screen walls had been rolled up, permitting the air and neighbors to circulate at will. Atop a carved wooden chest, a television flickered, displaying frantic images from halfway around the world. Thunder grumbled in the west. Lightning forked and branched and spread, outlining the underside of a growing storm in serpent tongues of flaring light.

As the wind picked up, sending long, rolling breakers to their deaths on the beach below, Cousin Nano moved to untie and lower the west wall. And then, between one lightning flash and the next, something changed; someone was added.

Sami Manumaleuga-Thorpe rose from the wooden floor, scattering children like front-yard chickens. She moved forward through the suddenly quiet house, and stopped short about a foot and a half away from the new arrival, who seemed to be in profound shock. The rest of the family stepped back, superstitiously silent.

Sami reached up and took her son's face in her hands, tilting the tall Marine's head so that she could look him in the eyes. He whispered, very quietly,

"Momma, am I dead?"

She moved a hand to pat his broad shoulder, feeling rigid tension beneath the red-and-gold Marine Corps tee shirt.

"No, Boy… you're here, with us. Thank God," she was crying, now. "I don't know how. I don't _care _how. But, he's home. My boy's come home!"

And then the rest of the family closed round, embracing the weeping mother and her numbed son. What kin weren't already present were quickly summoned, racing up foot paths and across log bridges in the rainy, dangerous darkness to welcome their boy.

Pats and hugs and kisses he got, and soft murmurs in many languages, but a certain face was missing; a certain woman.

Delayed reaction, raw and desperate and burning-hot, tore through Roger Thorpe. Shoving people aside, he demanded,

"Where's everyone else? _Where's Kim?"_


	4. Chapter 4: Judgement Call

4

_Washington, D.C., a Capitol Hill press room-_

It made for good television, but the timing might have been better. That was the news crews' general consensus, after a brief, shocking press conference held by Senator Stennis, and seen around the world.

He'd had a visitor, you see; a powerful and twisted man whose will could move from person to unsuspecting person, like caustic fluid eating its way through a succession of chipped and grubby cups. When his secretary shuffled in that rainy morning, still a bit sore from the 10-car pile up he'd staged, Stennis barely reacted. Jewel existed to serve him, after all, and the only thing he needed at the moment, besides coffee, was his 'legitimate' appointment schedule. (Meetings with Campfire Girls, crippled-kid photo ops; that sort of thing…)

He had no idea what had just entered his office, using the faithful Jewel as a conduit to obtain information. To his cost, Lamar Stennis was about to find out.

The battle was short, and one-sided. Stennis was a wily opponent, a snake and a plotter, but what faced him then was a thing dragged back from death; confused and filled with hate.

The senator lifted his head, saw a pair of flame-yellow eyes. He hardly had time to register shock before molten rage stabbed into him, taking hold of his mind as a parasitic wasp might sting its prey, leaving a paralyzed host forits hungrylarvae.

A few phone calls later, 'Stennis' lined up the press conference. It was lightly attended, for violent weather and rumors of a tragic apparition in Times Square had distracted the Capitol Hill press corps. No matter. Word, and fear, would spread.

Stepping through the heavy blue curtains and up to the wooden speaker's podium, squinting in hot camera lights, Stennis fiddled with a microphone and surveyed his small, puzzled audience. He gave them a brief nod, without the trademark earnest smile, gripped the top of the podium, and began to speak.

"Ladies and Gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming out here on such short notice. I've got a few things to say, but I'll keep it brief. Most of you know me as Lamar Stennis, Texas' representative to the United States Senate. I am that… _and_ a terrorist, a liar and a murderer, many times over. I am the secret head of an organization called 'the Red Path', whose sole aim is to overthrow the World Government and establish a newer, purer order. It's a simple vision, but it's meant a lot to me, and to my lieutenant, Vicente Vargas, whose body you'll find in the trunk of my car. Together we dreamt of peace and order; no one too smart, or too dumb, no corrupting technologies. Plenty of real food and hard work, with everyone free to do just as he likes… so long as it's upright and moral."

The sound of dropping jaws and flying eyebrows nearly buried his next few comments. Even the hardened D.C. news hounds were shocked. Was this some sort of joke…?

A young intern tried to pull Stennis away from the mike, but he shrugged her off, his thin face glowing with a sort of fanatical joy.

"I see now, ladies and gentlemen of the press, fellow politicians and valued citizens, that I've served my purpose. My job has been well and rightly done, and it's time for me to step down and claim my just reward."

He appeared to be seeing, not a mostly-empty auditorium, but a vision of martyred welcome in some moralistic worker's paradise. At any rate, when Senator Stennis pulled the ceramic handgun from inside his blue jacket, he looked like a man accepting the honor of a lifetime.

Aides sprang forward, interns screamed, reporters snapped to their cameramen,

_'Are you getting all this?'_

…But the crazed senator heard none of it. Instead, he pressed the gun's cool muzzle to his own chin, saying,

"I'm going on now, folks, but don't you fret," (His come-and-go Texas accent was back again, warm and thick as pancake syrup)

"The Red Path is in good hands, and the work goes on."

Next, smiling at them all, Stennis indulged himself witha last, obscure joke.

"So, 'goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are'." And then, he pulled the trigger.

_Princeton, NJ, half a boy's lifetime earlier-_

To John's surprise, classes here were different. For one thing, they were interesting. In each class… differential equations, Latin, computer applications, dark matter physics… he sat in the very back, slouched and silent. But he _listened_, taking in everything the grad student said, to make up for nine long years of bored emptiness.

He'd arrive with the bell and leave a bit early, trying to minimize contact with the other students. Didn't always work, though. The computer applications class, in particular, required him to interact, to cooperate. That was rough. Other than his brothers, he hadn't much recent practice at getting along, and even with them, the scorecard was spotty.

The computer guy was an actual professor, though a young and scruffy one. Dr. Page was his name, and he took an interest in John early on, due to several alarmingly high exam grades. John made sure to throw a few questions, in each test thereafter; he'd learned his lesson.

But, the damage was done. Page began holding the teenager after class, attempting conversations which John merely shrugged through. He didn't really _want_ to be known, or liked; just to learn what he needed. Degrees were irrelevant, and so, at first, were people.

Most of his classes were anonymously vast, but computer applications, with its emphasis on internet security and high-level programming, had gathered a fairly select bunch. Mostly other males, each as different, in his way, as John was.

One of them had spiky brown hair, and wore the same Chicago Cubs jacket to class everyday. One night at the Underground, on level 3, John found himself a large, Brooklyn Dodgers tee shirt. After washing it about 10,000 times, he actually wore the thing. No big deal, except that it got a rise out of the Cubs fan, who stopped in front of his computer station to say,

"The Dodgers suck, man."

Okay. No, they _didn't,_ and he had the baseball cards to prove it. An intense, heat-lightning war of statistics ensued, which soon got everyone's attention, including that of Doctor Page. One of the class's two females, a hard-muscled, unsmiling girl named Denice, broke in from time to time with points of order, but the end result was a draw… and a friend. Richard Cutter, whose internet handle was _'Backslash'._

The other female was a real cipher, one of those withdrawn human shadows that nevertheless screamed silently for attention. Her name was Autumn Drew, though at first John thought of her as 'Creepy Goth Chick'. He had no idea what her actual hair or eye color was, for she dyed her asymmetric mane jet black, with a neon-green streak, and wore garnet-colored contacts. Her clothing seemed equally peculiar. One of her black (_always_ black) tunics displayed a row of skulls and crossed bones like this: X O X O X O. Beneath the symbols she'd Frankenstein-stitched the words _'Hugs and Kisses'._ She wore torn lace skirts, striped hose and black high-tops. The picture of elegance, painted upside-down and backward, by a very shaky hand.

And then, there was the guy who never seemed to leave. No matter when John, or the rest of the class, arrived, there he was, sitting at his computer station, waiting. Even Page wasn't sure how he got in, what with the doors locked. Weird.

Entirely by accident, John had stumbled upon the holding pen for odd behavior at Princeton University. For the first time in his life, he was _not _the strangest person in the room.


	5. Chapter 5: A Few Days

Belated thanks to Varda's Servant, Agent Five, Tikatu and Eternal Density for the reviews. Your suggestions and comments are a sourch of inspiration!

5

_Wharton Academy, New York State-_

Over breakfast at Stanton Hall, in the midst of the worst, least seasonable Nor'easter in living memory, the boys attempted to plan. It was a frantic, guilt-ridden effort, conducted in rushed whispers, over a background of clinking china and howling wind. Twice, the lights went out, but there were proctors and teachers aplenty to maintain order. Through the long, mullioned windows, Fermat could see gusts of sweeping rain blown nearly horizontal by the gale. What a day. What a situation.

Shoving aside his Eggs Benedict and melon salad, the boy leaned as close to Daniel and Sam as he could. Like him, they'd hardly slept for worrying.

"S- So, if we… somehow m- made this," Fermat was saying, wishing fervently that Ms. Wilde wouldn't hover, so, "then it's up to… to us to _un-_make it."

But Sam shook his head, pretending to take a mouthful of tomato juice when the Headmaster, Edgar Case, looked their way.

"Fermat… _how?_ Only that weird power surge provided the energy to make all these changes, in the first place. Design a new scenario and upload it, if you want to, but without sufficient power to execute the commands, all you've got is a cute story."

Daniel wasn't even pretending to eat. The only thing on his gilt-edged plate was a sprig of parsley. Quite obviously, the older boy blamed himself for everything.

"D- Dan," Fermat said to him, "You've g-got to… to focus. If we… can't overwrite th-the program, we've got to… to deal with th-the situation as… written. That's what m-my father will… t-try to do, but he's… an adult, and th-they… don't understand… c-comic book scenarios, or s-self aware computers."

Daniel Solomon managed a nod, then earned himself three demerits by wiping his nose on the linen napkin. Grief, shock and guilt were certainly present, but he couldn't allow them to paralyze him. Not now. Once the elderly proctor had stalked off to record his demerits, the boy began reasoning aloud.

"Right… So, if it runs as written, if this uber-computer of yours doesn't make any changes, then the storm will last for three weeks, altering entire coastlines and wiping out several major cities (not the people, though; they all escape, because of the Thunderbirds)."

Sam opened his mouth to say something, but a swift kick beneath the table from Fermat convinced him that now was _not_ the time to discuss odds. Daniel continued,

"The astronauts should start reappearing, soon, except for McCord…"

Cut in Fermat, sharply,

"And, why n-not… the m-mission commander?"

Daniel shot him an impatient scowl.

"Because he sacrifices himself nobly, to make up for what he did, remember? It's a tried-and-true plot device: last minute redemption!"

And then, hit afresh by what he'd done, Daniel whispered,

"I'm so sorry…"

Fifteen minutes till clean-up, and the start of morning assembly. They had to get a plan worked out, _soon._

Sam, who'd been surreptitiously consulting his PDA beneath the pearly tablecloth, said,

"I've been hacking wireless communications between WorldGov and NASA. Three astronauts have apparently called Houston from phones in Samoa, Florida and New York City."

Fermat did some swift mental juggling, and came up with a figure he didn't like.

"Not… another P-Pacific island?" he probed urgently, "or, Wyoming? Maybe K-Kansas?"

Sam shook his head, dark almond eyes utterly solemn.

"No. I'm sorry. Only the three, so far. But, John Tracy _has_ to be alive, if we're sticking to the script. Any idea where _else_ he might have been transferred to? The theme here seems to be 'refuge'. A place of relative safety. Where could he go, and be right at home?"

Like Daniel and Fermat, Sam was a fan of NASA and the Mars mission, and he knew a fair bit about the background of each astronaut. Not as much as his friend, though.

A virtual floodlight exploded in Fermat's head, suddenly.

_"Princeton!"_ he cried out, loudly enough to draw stares from the trio's long-suffering fellow diners. With murmurs of _'geek'_ and _'weirdo', _the affronted students shifted themselves a bit further down the long table. As this gave Fermat, Daniel and Sam greater privacy, the three friends minded not at all. But, only five minutes left till the end of breakfast…

"He'd g-go to… Princeton, or around… there, s-somewhere. Un-until Mr. Tracy pulled… everyone b- back to the island… he lived at th-the university, and h-had friends… there. _That's _where John would end up!"

Daniel lifted his head, briefly.

"We'd better find him quick, then, before the Hood does. Remember the story…" Brown eyes returning to his empty plate, the boy continued heavily,

"The Hood's back, too, and he's trying to capture John Tracy as a hostage."

"G-great…" the brief flare of excitement died as Fermat contemplated what seemed like a truly impossible task. Two minutes remaining.

"S-so… we've got to find… some way to… to stop a g-grown up villain, who… y-you've written as… a _t-total_ psychotic. We're… d-doomed."

The headmaster had risen from the teacher's table, was striding to the dais at the front of the dining hall. Sam hissed, in the few short moments before prayer and dismissal,

"What's his weakness? Every pulp bad guy has an exploitable weakness, to ensure a tidy storyline."

Daniel's eyes lit up, and he nodded vigorously.

"Yeah," the pudgy boy replied, straightening suddenly. "And the new, improved Hood does, too. I was in a hurry, and couldn't think of anything else, so I made his resurrection temporary. The Hood's got 48 hours before he gets sucked back into oblivion, and..."

Following three sharp raps of an ebony gavel, the headmaster's deep voice intoned,

"Young gentlemen of Wharton Academy, rise, and let us give thanks for what we have received."

Under cover of scuffing chairs and rolling thunder, Fermat said,

"S-so if we can… just get to P-Princeton, we…can find John, and w-warn him to… keep out of… harm's way f-for two days. D-Daniel," he turned to his friend, as hands were folded and heads bowed,

"…how well can you drive?"

_Thunderbird 2, after blasting away from a Hawaiian hospital-_

If anything, the storm was growing worse; bigger and fiercer, with winds that shook Thunderbird 2 like a plastic toy. How he'd managed to rescue so many people, Virgil Tracy had no idea. Somehow, everything seemed to be going just right, events coming together with almost impossible, split-second timing.

Shoving at the steering yoke, Virgil wrestled his Bird toward the island, through what felt like a hurricane. Not that he was headed home for good, or anything. There was yet another rescue to perform, an extremely dangerous one.

As Alan and TinTin made their cautious way up the vibrating cargo pod ladder, Virgil stubbed out his cigarette and called an absent brother. The left view screen flickered in 2's darkened cockpit, then lit up with an image of Gordon.

He looked rather sooty, seeming to have burned himself, somehow. Nothing beyond a reddened shoulder and some charred clothing, though. Virgil smiled, and shook his head.

"You been playing with matches again, Kiddo?"

The red-head gave him a wicked, slightly lop-sided grin.

"Eh. The usual sad tale. Dousin' fires, rescuin' maidens. All in the day's work. And you?"

Virgil laughed. Had they been together in the cockpit, he'd have knuckled the top of his young co-pilot's head.

"Fishing," the big pilot replied, music and coordinates swirling through the back of his mind, "and looking for a partner. Got a major situation off Curacao I could use some help with. There's a drop-off to make, still, and a yellow 'boat' to pick up, and then I'm off. Care to come along?"

In Madrid, in the lobby of the Santa Clara women's dormitory, Gordon stepped away from Anika, and the others. Curacao? As in… the Sea Base?

"You're havin' me on," Gordon objected. He'd considered the terrorist threat to the domed city well over with. _"Alpha's_ been hit? When? How badly?"

Virgil's smile had vanished. Over the wrist comm's little screen, his image shrugged.

"According to dad, it's serious. Storm and seismic damage, apparently. There's, uh… something else, too. Something about Times Square, and maybe John. The explanation wasn't too clear, but we're to handle Sea Base, first, regardless. Pack your stuff, and get ready to go."

And then he gave the younger brother his pick-up coordinates and rendezvous time. After signing off, Gordon started for the doors. He had an hour, barely, in which to reach his own dorm, make some sort of excuse to Coach McMahon, and get his arse to the remote collection site… with a damn thunderstorm brewing, yet.

The young athlete had a palm upon the glass, ready to stiff-arm his way through the doors, when a sudden thought struck him. Pivoting, Gordon raced back over to where Anika was comforting little Sharon. Bela Stepanovic was there, as well. He'd wielded the extinguisher that had created a path for Gordon and the little lass. Anika, it was, who'd pulled them the last few feet to safety.

Excusing himself to the coach and Sharon, Gordon drew Anika aside. A little away from the others, he kissed her, the way he'd seen in the movies; the way that meant _'you are all that really matters'._

He'd had something fine-sounding in mind to say, but what came out was just this:

"I love you. I have t' go, but this time, Nika, I'm comin' back. My word on it."

She looked up at him, small hands complicated in the scorched material of his blue tee-shirt. She'd loved Gordon Tracy since the Portland Olympics, with a constancy that hadn't once faltered, and her green eyes fairly glowed with it.

"Have carefulness," she managed to say, knowing, in that way lasses had, exactly what he was about. "I wait for you."

When he'd gone, Bela came over to place a big hand on the girl's bowed shoulder.

"He is good boy," Her coach decided, giving the little gymnast a comforting pat. "I think I am liking him, after all."

_Tracy Island, the med lab-_

Scott Tracy was a hero in the quiet sense, as well as the flashy ones. Thunderbird 2's ground-shaking touchdown had waked him from drugged slumber, so up he got. With effort, unhealed but determined, Scott forced himself off the treatment table.

Grandmother Tracy started to protest, but he shook his head.

"No, Grandma," he told the tiny old woman, patting her wrinkled hand, where it rested upon his arm. "They need me out there, and I'm going. Virge can't handle all this alone. I'll be fine, I promise. Just get me some aspirin, and point me in the right direction."

Victoria Tracy glanced over at Gennine, just stepping back in through the office door. From the look on her former daughter-in-law's face, things out there were grim, indeed.

Reluctantly, then, the old woman nodded, biting her lip against a sudden stab from her injured collarbone.

"You take Alan and TinTin with you, Boy." She commanded. "And don't you do nothin' stupid, neither! Hear? Bad enough, we got one a million miles away, digging holes on some rusty-damn space rock!"

"Yes, Ma'am."

Gennine shied herself up to them, hesitant as ever. In so many little ways she was the very mirror of lost Lucinda, but without the other's boldness, her 'spit in the face of disaster' confidence.

For some reason (maybe it was the painkillers, or the slowly dissolving nanobots still fizzing through his blood stream) Scott gave her a brief, clumsy hug.

"Wish me luck, Mom," he said with a smile.

_Kennedy Space Center, Florida-_

Being closest, Linda Bennett was picked up first; returning to the Cape in an unmarked van, through a fierce and toothy storm. The dark-suited men brought her directly to the medical center for examination, politely putting off her questions with,

"I'm sorry, Captain Bennett, we weren't given any information on that,"

Or…

"No, Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I don't know what's happening, either."

Very polite to a former officer, very firm and _very _uninformative. Linda was ready to scream. She was confused, and worried, and angry. She'd had a _mission, _dammit! She'd been exploring Mars, building a colony with the best friends she'd ever had. And now, somehow, she was back on Earth. Alone, and decidedly under the weather. Where were the others? Pete and Roger and Kim Cho? Where was John?

Linda flushed a little as she recalled part of the wild dream she'd been having, when everything went terminally wrong. On the one hand, _thank God_ it was just a dream. On the other… Well. She was certainly beyond that sort of thing. Wasn't she?

More frustrations followed, as medicos and lab technicians poked, prodded and tested her, asking the same stupid questions over and over. They kept their lab results a secret, finally shifting the former Air Force nurse to a windowless waiting room. It was a bleak place, almost a cell, its single locked door guarded by secret service types.

Then Cho arrived, looking tense and pale in her night shirt and cotton sleep pants. The two women embraced in the midst of the waiting room, sitting down upon the vinyl couch to exchange stories.

"I was asleep," the Korean exobiologist told her, voice ragged with fatigue and hysteria. "…and then, back at my high school, PS -21, in Manhattan. There was a terrible explosion from mid-town, and then no lights, and everyone was screaming and running into the halls. I thought that it must be a nightmare, Linda, but some of the students, and a horse officer during the evacuation, recognized me. I called as soon as I could find a phone."

Bennett nodded.

"Me, too, once the shock wore off, and I could get through. I was having this really weird dream…"

Once again, uncontrollably, Linda blushed. Cho's eyebrows lifted delicately, but she held her silence, allowing Linda to regroup and continue.

"Anyway… one minute I'm, um, on the flight deck… occupied… and the next, I'm back home, walking into the 'Get-n-Go' for a soda. But, you know what's _really _strange, Kim?"

Cho, who'd risen to fetch them both a paper cone of water from the cooler, shook her head. She seemed calmer, now; as though having one friend show up made it inevitable that the others, too, would be safe.

"I checked the timing… my wristwatch, the calendar… and it turns out that I showed up back homealmost threehours before the night watch ended. Kim, I was in two places at once, somehow."

After a bracing sip from her limp and soggy water cone, Linda said,

"Dan gave me the soda for free, and let me call Houston from his phone at the shop. I thought Gene was going to _cry_, he sounded so relieved."

Dr. Kim started to respond, then paused, hearing something from out in the corridor. Nobody, then or now, could curse like a Marine, and no one but Roger Thorpe in so many colorful languages. Paper cone and chilled water went flying, and so did Kim Cho.

She met him at the door, where he all at once ceased threatening his guards, and hauled her into his arms. Linda bit her lip, staring at the tiled floor as whispers and tears and soft, searching kisses passed between Roger and Cho. That was love, and it wove a circle about the two of them that for many long minutes, nothing else could penetrate.

She was happy for them… and very, very lonely. Kind of ironic, Linda thought to herself, that the one person she _hadn't _thought of, till just that moment, was Spencer, her (sort-of) boyfriend.

She looked up when Roger and Cho, slightly flushed and still holding hands, came over. Said the Marine, frowning puzzledly,

"Where're Pete and John? Still in testing?" For he, too, had been subjected to every medical exam known to man, and a few newly invented ones. "Or, en route?"

"I don't know," Dr. Bennett responded grimly, now the mission's de facto leader, "But I aim to find out. With your cooperation, we're still a flight crew, this is _still_ a mission, and we don't quit till everyone's accounted for. Deal?"

Roger and Cho glanced at one another, then back at Linda. The big Marine nodded, speaking for both of them.

"Yes, _Ma'am_. You've got the con. Orders?"

The doctor turned toward the door, and started walking.

"First," she said, "we get out of here, and figure out what the hell happened."

_Underground, Trenton NJ-_

According to rumor, three astronauts had been sighted, and a body pulled from the wreckage of what reporters were now openly calling _Endurance._ Three astronauts… from New York City, Florida, and Samoa…

There was a Senate press conference scheduled for 12:00, but John switched off the television. He hated politics. Nothing but lies, and organized theft, all of it. Shifting his physical attention back to the work at hand, a series of glitching circuit boards, John considered the situation.

His family was still in danger from mysterious assailants… three astronauts were more or less accounted for… he'd gone to ground in DNC's shop… and an unidentified set of remains had turned up. His own? No way to tell, really. Not yet. The medical examiners weren't talking, and neither was NASA. As far as John knew, his old body had been pretty much incinerated, obliterating all trace of the alien intelligence. There shouldn't have been that much left to cart off, and poke around in. So, that left him with…

From force of habit, John rubbed at his left wrist, but this body… this transplanted _kid_… had no ID chip. Evidently, things were different, where he'd come from.

Okay, then: next option. Looking over at the shop security monitor, currently scanning Denice talking with a pair of customers, he said,

"Where's Pete McCord, Five? What's happened to him?"

He hadn't invoked her before then, not quite knowing how _not _to blame her for all that had happened; for kidnap, death and disaster. Words appeared, scrolling suddenly across the bottom of the black-and-white security screen.

What had passed between them, back on Mars, had yet to be dealt with. No longer in a human body, Five exhibited a logical, rather than chemical, response to his question. Maybe too logical.

_'John Tracy, the entity David-Pete-McCord has not been reinserted. Entity David-Pete-McCord is deemed a security risk, hazard level 3.'_

Reinserted? Like a file, or symbol? John pushed the hair from his face and stepped closer to the screen, avoiding piled junk as best he could. The 'David-Pete' thing was surprising, at first, until he recalled that 'Pete' was just a nickname. The rest, though…

"What do you mean, 'security risk'? He's the mission commander, Five. A family friend."

More scrolling words, then a series of images.

_'John Tracy, the organic entity David-Pete-McCord is in possession of sensitive data. Entity has attempted to gain access to secure files. Entity has been labeled malware.'_

And then, she replayed digital footage taken from _Endurance's_ security cameras, showing the mission commander interrogating a drugged and stuporous John, just prior to his cryo-sleep. Leading questions were asked, about International Rescue and the World Unity Complex attack.

_'He didn't trust me,' _John realized suddenly, blue-violet eyes locked on the floor. _'He thought I had something to do with the UC collapse.'_

Somewhere inside him, things shifted around. Sharp things, edged in betrayal. He closed them off with a single, icy shrug. No time, and beside the point, anyway. What mattered now was the mission commander, who surely had had a reason…

He said aloud, thinking of Stephanie, and Aunt Lydia,

"Bring him back, Five. Reinsert entity David-Pete-McCord. Now." He was careful to copy her terminology, aware that wording was never an accident, with Five.

_'File not found.'_ The letters scrolled past, implacably calm, and utterly false.

"Bullshit. You're not running Windows, Five, and you know as well as I do that the file's been backed up, somewhere."

Maybe another line of argument?

"Also, there _is _no security risk, because…" (Sudden brain wave) "I was about to make Pete an operative. Bring him back."

Operatives, she understood. They were subroutines, variants in the main program with access to certain secure files. The actions of David-Pete-McCord were allowable, in this context.

_'Data file located. Opening David-Pete-McCord. Error, John Tracy. File insertion requires greater system power than is currently free.'_

Deep breath. Start again.

"Where did you get the power from, the first time? To move us all back here, I mean?"

On the security screen, the customers had grown angry, leaning a bit too close to Denice, who calmly pulled out a large fire arm. All at once, the burly shoppers became much more polite. John stepped out, though, to give DNC a little backup. The underground was a freewheeling sort of place, a former parking garage taken over by hackers, vendors, college students and outright thugs; interesting, but potentially dangerous.

Fortunately, the matter outside resolved itself pretty quickly, coming down to a dispute over the price of a pirated password cracking device. Denice gave the men a discount, and they went away happy, presumably to raid a few data files. John kept his mouth shut, and returned to the back, where Five's last response still flickered on the security monitor.

_'Power to shift probable locations acquired from trans-dimensional wormhole, John Tracy. This source is no longer accessible. Remaining memory assigned to storm.'_

Square one…

Returning to the circuit board he'd been soldering, John picked up a set of goggles, and said,

"The _storm_ is eating up memory? So, get rid of it, then. Drop the bad weather and reapply freed space to moving a few more people."

_'Searching. Done. Power accessible for insertion of David-Pete-McCord or deletion of organic entity Hood.'_

All at once, he set aside the soldering iron, goggles and circuit board, admirably controlled, under the circumstances.

"Deletion of _what?"_

_'Entity Hood. Reinserted after power surge, according to scripted command.'_

Hell, no. Not again.

"Either-or, huh?" He questioned, still trying to come to grips with the notion that a few lines of script and a massive power surge could not just move things around, but alter reality. "Insert Pete, or delete the Hood?"

A thin curl of smoke twisted into the air, as the tip of the soldering iron touched an old monitor case. He moved the tool.

_'This has been stated, John Tracy. Attempting to run both commands will temporarily exceed available memory and power.'_

Shit.

"Wait a minute… it _could _be done, but you'd… what? Brown out for awhile?"

_'A 36 hour power-down will result from these actions, John Tracy.'_

The words flitted across glass, then paused, blinking upon the screen while Denice sold a highly modified laptop, and John considered his options.

"Never mind the Hood," he decided. "I can handle him. What about _this_ guy?" And he pointed at his new body's slender chest. "Can you replace his memory files, and send him home?"

_'Negative. Transfer of current physical housing will lead to cessation. Cessation of John Tracy is not an allowable option.'_

John stood up and approached the screen, again; arguing with coldly blinking letters.

"What about duplicating him, then? Five… this kid needs to go home. Someone out there is wondering where the hell he is, and I can't just…"

For an instant, he was unable to continue speaking. Then,

"Stealing someone is not an allowable option to _me._ Can you understand that? Any more than deleting a friend is, or letting you be destroyed by a virus."

She'd listened, but more than that, she'd _understood. _

_'Requested operations: insert David-Pete-McCord/ duplicate John Tracy file will require all available memory and power. A 72 hour brown-out will follow. Do you wish to run operations?'_

72 hours. Three days. What the hell, huh? Might as well roll the dice.

"Yeah. Execute. I can take care of myself and my family for a few days, Five."

She responded at once, blanking out the screen's security images to display enlarged text, and a familiar lavender icon.

_'There is a convention among your species, John Tracy: Good luck. Appropriate help commands will be entered with the over system.'_

John folded his arms across his chest, wishing suddenly that she had an actual, physical presence. On Mars… But he pushed the thought away.

"Right. Thanks for the wishes, Five. See you in a few days."

26


	6. Chapter 6: Thunderstorm

6

_Outside Madrid, overgrown hiking trail-_

Gordon waited at the lee side of a great boulder, huddled against chilly wind and slashing rain. It was 6 AM, and dawn should have been painting the heavens, but all he saw was sky-spanning lightning and streaming, ragged clouds. _'Thunderstorm'_ was a very small word to describe a tempest of such howling, ferocious proportions.

Battered and drenched, he dared not pull his phone out to check the internet weather service. Hadn't done since scraping his way through the bare-knuckled rugby scrum that was downtown Madrid. As always, frightened people in large numbers were difficult to predict, and Gordon'd had a hell of a time leaving the city with a whole skin. Thankfully, Anika was still safe at the women's dorm, with her coach and teammates. One less thing. As for the rest…

Last he'd heard, the storm was at once intensifying, and getting larger. Out at sea, low-lying islands were awash, drowned beneath hundred-foot waves. His final call, before the weather set its fangs, had been home. Grandmother picked up, informing him that Scott had been injured, but was up again, and that she was leading Brains, Kyrano and Alan's mum to higher ground. At that point, he'd lost the connection. Just an antenna down somewhere, probably. Hopefully.

Gordon pushed himself closer to the rock's gritty solidity, shifting position every time the wind did. He was out here waiting until he got picked up, or washed away. And an open question it seemed to him, which would come first.

A torrent of cold, muddy water and loose pebbles sluiced past at ankle level, undercutting the very ground beneath his feet. Gordon had to keep madly shifting his stance, just to stay upright.

Over all, like heavy marker on ink wash, came blue-white flashes, bomb-burst detonations and moaning wind. Half deafened, wet and miserable, Gordon found himself longing for his dive gear. He was as good as underwater, anyway; at least in warm neoprene and a mask, he'd be comfortable.

The wind swirled, wavered a bit, then chose a new direction, attacking from the west, this time. Gordon was able to move, wading through a red clay waterfall to reach the boulder's east face, but an old tree clinging to its split summit, a twisted pine of some sort, wasn't as fortunate.

A particularly vicious gust wrenched the old tree from its long perch. It hurtled to the ground, and only a wild, sloshing dodge saved Gordon a nasty crack on the head. Things _were_ looking up a bit, though; his burns hurt hardly at all, anymore. Or maybe he simply hadn't time to pay attention.

He scanned the skies as well and often as he was able, but all the rain and flying branches made it difficult to see. Anyhow, with the constant, guttural storm-rumble, Thunderbird 2 might have hovered fifty feet above him without being…

Rocket engines, Gordon discovered, made a distinct and welcome sound. The clouds above him glowed infernally red at four separate points, blasted clean through by Thunderbird 2's steering rockets. A great, flat belly descended, spotlights illuminating the big, white _'2'_ painted upon her wet green hull. It was a sight to inspire a joyous whoop, and a bit of awed cursing, as well.

Thunderbird 2 blocked most of the rain, her basso profundo pressure wave and impeller field brushing aside wind and weather. Stepping cautiously away from the boulder, Gordon hit his wrist comm, watching as a hatch yawned opennear the bow. From the ruby darkness within came the clank and rattle of a winch. An insulated rescue basket lowered, electric-white in the constant lightning strobes. When it came within a meter or so, Gordon leapt like a salmon, caught hold and hauled himself over the side, fastening his safety straps while the world around him swung and spun.

Another touch to the wrist comm, and the basket began to rise, ratcheting upward through a fierce and homicidal dawn. Around the edges of Thunderbird 2's impeller field, the storm mumbled and clawed, but the sopping wet teenager was safe. A bit embarrassed, too, over just how much he was enjoying the ride (_anything that didn't kill him, after all, would make a helluva story, later)_.

Hauled up into relative safety, Gordon waited for the hatch to close and the winch arm to pivot. Then, he climbed out, taking a moment or two to accustom himself to the cargo hold's dim red night-lighting. No sense going through all that drama, just to trip and break his neck afterward, like an utter prat.

Just as he started moving again, something happened. At first, Gordon thought that one of the engines had misfired, or that something had struck Thunderbird 2. Except that the 'explosion' was totally soundless; a ripple that seemed to slightly flex everything it touched. Gordon felt it, but he didn't understand it.

A bulkhead screen cut on, transmitting Virgil's up-sized image. Meant for communicating with massed refugees, the comm was necessarily big, and _loud._

"You okay, down there?" His brother boomed.

"Right as rain," Gordon replied cheerfully, rubbing some of the wretched stuff out of his eyes. "Bit damp, is all."

On the huge screen, Virgil relaxed somewhat.

"Yeah. Guess I'm just edgy. For a second there, I coulda sworn… never mind. See you topside in five."

So, Gordon left the clamorous hold, stopping off briefly to check on Thunderbird 4. No need for concern, as it happened; locked into her clamps on the revolving launch pad, the stubby yellow Waterbird looked as fit and fast as ever. All status lights green. The ripple, whatever it was, hadn't harmed her.

Gordon ran a loving hand over her smoothly polished hull.

"Hello, Lass," he greeted the sub, allowing voice ID and retinal scanners to take his measure, "ready f'r another splash down?"

Once he was recognized, the pre-launch sequence started up. When the time came, Thunderbird 4 would be ready.

The young aquanaut next squished his way over to his uniform locker, back in the rear crew cabin. It was easily recognized by all the PADI, surf and 'spitfire' stickers covering the battered metal door.

Outside the big aircraft, thunder growled and wind shoved; inside, Gordon peeled off his dripping clothes, toweled himself dry, then changed into a pair of trunks and a full dive suit. Made of black and yellow neoprene, and fitted out with Brains' special 'no lights' sensory fittings, the suit zipped shut from left knee to chin. There were boots and gloves, as well, and these Gordon quickly drew on, glad of their snug warmth. Closed up like that, his burns began smarting again, though. Oh, well; aspirin, manly attitude, and all that.

A swift glance at the locker-door mirror proved that all was as it should be… assuming one was content to be short, red-haired and plain as ditch water. Well, there had to be _something _there. Nika certainly liked what she'd seen.

Right. Gordon shrugged, gave the matter up as a bad job, and clanged the locker door shut. Less than a minute later, he'd entered the smoky cockpit, greeting his older brother with a cough and a brusque, friendly clap to the shoulder. Tumbling into the co-pilot's seat, he began strapping in.

Virgil acknowledged him with a distracted grunt, eyes on the instrument panel, mind on the mission ahead. Once Gordon was settled, the pilot transferred fine rocket and weapon control to the right seat. Main engines, navigation and rudder, he kept for himself.

They were now about 600 miles from Curacao, according to the Nav screen. ETA, 24 minutes and counting.

Gordon peered at Virgil through a cloud of wreathing smoke. His brother's face was illuminated, dimly, by diodes and lightning spears. From the look of things, he was having to fight to keep the big girl on course. Anything smaller and less powerful than Thunderbird 2 would have been smashed from the sky like an injured wren. But, the cargolifter was enormous, and luck very much on their side. Had Virgil been the superstitious sort, he'd have worried that 'Murphy' was saving it all up for one giant disaster.

Flapping a hand to clear the air, Gordon said,

"What's happened at home, then? Is Scott all right? I spoke with grandmother, and she said somethin' about an explosion and some injuries. And, what was all that about John?"

Bruised-purple cloud stuff slipped past the windows. Try as he might, Virgil couldn't seem to get above it. Not at this latitude, anyway.

_"Damn storm must reach low orbit,"_ he muttered. Well past Thunderbird 2's safe operating limits, anyway. Still fighting with the yoke, Virgil responded,

"Hard to say… things got kind of…_urf!_... hairy. One of Brains' _ideas _backfired… again. Scott walked into the blast… a little before this storm came on."

Gordon shielded his eyes from a particularly brilliant flare. Up here, lightning seemed to fill and illuminate the entire cloud. The cockpit, too.

"He'll recover, though? Grandmother said he was up, again."

"Yeah…" _(brief pause, as Virgil struggled with a sudden, violent down draft)_ "…pretty safe bet, Kiddo… It'd take a tactical nuclear strike to put Scott out of the picture."

The air currents whipped around on them, and all at once Thunderbird 2 was battling a savage, screaming head wind. Virgil hauled back on the steering yoke, trying to get above this sudden jet stream.

"And John…?" Gordon ventured, when they'd at last crested the worst of it, shooting like a comet over a 'landscape' of high-piled, dusky clouds. Above the storm, the sunlight seemed piercing bright. Gordon adjusted the window's filters, adding, "He'll do, as well?"

Virgil hesitated, then keyed up WNN Live news coverage. Snowy and silent, images flickered across the right view screen.

_More violent weather… circling heli-jets… broken skyscrapers glowing with sullen, radioactive light… and, through one of the buildings, somehow… a blackened spaceship. _

Only his seat straps blocked Gordon's sudden lunge for the controls.

"Virgil, we've got t' get over there," he said, his voice rapid and strained. "There's no bloody _way_ the American fire crews c'n handle that, and John may be…"

Virgil cut off the video feed. Broad shoulders hunched, handsome face bleak, the pilot shook his head.

"No. We're needed at the Sea Base, Gordon. I don't know what's happened to… with the… in New York, but if we don't get to Curacao, right the hell now, hundreds of people are gonna drown. We got ships and planes going down everywhere, stuff showing up in the water that no one can ID... We're the best hope these people have got, and we can't walk away from them, not even for one of our own."

Against a backdrop of engine rumble and whirring instruments, Virgil's deep voice reasoned on, almost whispering,

"John and the other astronauts'll be fine. They have to be."

His brown eyes met Gordon's hazel ones, revealing firmness of purpose… and painful uncertainty. It was just about killing him, to turn his back on the situation in Times Square.

"We've got a job to do, and civilians come first. John would say so, himself. You _know_ that."

Like hell, he did. No communications with the island, Scott injured, John in desperate trouble, but everybody else came first, no matter what, right? Maybe Virgil was making sense, but that didn't mean his younger brother had to like it. Gordon choked off an angry reply and thudded back against his seat, arms folded tightly. He didn't speak again until they reached storm-ravaged Curacao, and the endangered city beneath the sea.

_Saginaw, Michigan… elsewhen-_

Tossed through space and time, a very confused older man _(fifty-ish, not tall, sandy haired and with a rather good humored , if ordinary, face)_ appeared suddenly. Between one blink and another, he was added to a busy street scene, standing in front of a shuttered movie house at the corner of Ivy and Main. The Crowne Theatre.

He'd spent a lot of time there, in his childhood, alone in the dark withMilk Dudsand monster films. For a long several minutes, Pete McCord was too disoriented to do anything but blink. Then, he began shaking.

Most people, passing this way and that on the downtown sidewalk, pretended not to notice. The confused, balding man wore faded sweatpants and a U.S. Navy tee shirt. He was barefooted, after all, looked drunk, and might be dangerous.

Mothers shepherded their children well past him, crossing to the other side of the street to avoid the sudden apparition, whom they didn't recall _arriving_, but didn't quite trust. Then, a kindly older woman in a dark blue uniform approached him. She was a Salvation Army officer, whose job it was to guide street people to the local mission. Captain Mabry was thickset, with bright-dyed hair and a warm, genuine smile.

"Honey," she said, gently taking Pete's hand, "are you lost?"

_Johnson Space Center, Houston Texas-_

Gene Porter had waited in his office, head in hands, for the autopsy results. He needed answers, before he faced Linda, Roger and Cho. What NASA knew at this point was pretty close to nothing. They had an impossibly transported ship, three inexplicably safe astronauts, two no-shows, a body… and too many damn questions. Gene was near to pulling his own hair out in tufts.

The Director himself had phoned the families, and contact personnel (former astronauts all) were already on their way. Gene sat in his office, rain pelting the windows at his back, elbows on desk, and waited for the phone. Finally, it rang. The receiver was off its cradle and jammed to his ear before the first chime died away.

"Gene Porter. Go ahead."

"Mr. Porter?" Came a voice, hissy with static, at the other end of a very long distance. "This is…"

Gene cut him off.

"I know who it is, Dr. Levitz. I've got caller ID, like everyone else. What's the story?"

The medical examiner cleared his throat. Despite everything, he, too, hated bad news.

"The remains were in poor shape, Mr. Porter. Pretty close to carbonized, in fact. We had to resort to dental records, finally, in order to…"

"Doctor, get to the point, please. _Which one is it?"_

After a brief, reproachful pause, the doctor replied.

"The pilot, Mr. Porter. Examining dental records, and what little DNA was available to collect and assay, we've assigned the remains to John Tracy." Then, more quietly, "I'm sorry."

Gene's hand tightened on the receiver. Like he was watching a movie, he could see Pete McCord arguing for the young man's inclusion, could see Jeff Tracy's proud smile, at the post-launch press conference. And Pete had yet to turn up, the rest of the downed ship to be explored… Who else were they going to find?

God _damn,_ but it hurt. There was no defense against the loss of a friend and comrade, no matter how well you thought you'd prepared yourself. His office was blurred, then, by something that stung his eyes and spotted his desk calendar.

"Mr. Porter? Sir…?" the New York State medical examiner prodded gently. "I assume you'll want transport, with full…"

"Thank you, Doctor. We'll… be in touch about the arrangements. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some calls to make."

And then, very, very gently, Gene set the phone back on its cradle.

_Thunderbird 2, over Sea Base Alpha-_

Gordon unstrapped and got to his feet, bracing himself against the pitching deck with one hand to his seat back. The cargolifter's engines were at full burn, roaring like a quartet of dragons, just to maintain position. They'd contacted Alpha's commander, conferencing hurriedly as Sky Divers, Tiger Sharks and escape craft shot away from the flooding city.

"Show time," Virgil murmured, without adding the usual 'kiddo'. The silence between them had stretched cold and brittle as a pane of glass, all the way from Europe. He couldn't leave it that way. Not in the midst of all this.

Clearing his throat a bit, Gordon said,

"Right, then. Good luck with th' afternoon showers, Virgil."

His older brother gave him a quick, searching look, then managed a smile.

"Yeah. You, too. Have fun splashing in the puddles, kid. Stay safe."

Something passed between them. A plan of action. Though neither spoke the thought aloud, the very first thing they intended to do, once Alpha was seen to, was race directly over to New York City, and _Endurance._

A few minutes later, bone-weary but clear-headed, Gordon was back in his own Bird and ready to go. Virgil brought Thunderbird 2 as close as he dared to the ocean's roiled surface. His trouble was the waves, some of which were 70 to 100 feet high. The concerned pilot could keep Thunderbird 2 above them, but risked dropping his brother into a canyon-deep trough; a potentially deadly fall. Nor was that all.

There were garbled stories of weird creatures in the water; fish-shaped things with the snaggled jaws of giant crocodiles and enormous, lambent eyes. The Sea Base dolphins had no word for them besides _'shark'_, and were reportedly terrified. Needless to say, Virgil had a lot on his mind. Just then, it was unfiltered cigarettes, and the theme from _'The X-Files'_.

One surging wave after another crashed by beneath them, emerald-black mountains capped and laced in phosphorescent white.

"Ready?" He called down, timing an on-rushing crest.

"Fire away," Gordon's voice shot back. The tractor rays were engaged, the forward hatch open, the ramp extended.

"Gotcha. 5…4…3…2…_and…_drop!"

The clamps retracted with a harsh, metallic snap, and Thunderbird 4 began to move, rocketing down the slipway. Guided by tractor beams, she arced forth, striking a wave head-on, about midway down its rumbling face. The tremendous concussion shook the little sub and her teenaged pilot to their core, like a sledgehammer smashing a metal dust bin. Thunderbird 4 flipped completely over, and Gordon found himself hanging upside-down in his seat straps, assaulted by ruby warning lights and blaring alarms. Outside, bubbles rushed past in dense sheets, quivering silver, moving the wrong way. _Uh-oh_, to say the least.

Stripping his gloves with hands that shook, Gordon seized the controls again, felt the troubled water close in around 'his' hull, swirling close against him as he plunged downward. Quick adjustment, natural as a flip-turn at the end of a pool lane, and he was upright again, buffeted by juddering turbulence. It was dark, down here, and no friendlier than the skies had been. There wasn't time to worry, though, or to consider all the proper checklists and guidelines, either. He had someplace to be.

Oriented once more, Gordon could just make out the faltering lights of Alpha's towered domes. Built atop a fluted sea-mount, the city winked and glimmered like pirates' treasure. Target acquired.

Gordon called in, letting Virgil know that he'd landed safely, and freeing his brother to begin airlifting victims from Curacao to the mainland. Then, barely aware that he was manipulating controls, he surged forward. The murky water was full of churned-up sand, broken coral and confusing… 'smells' was the wrong word. Chemical traces, maybe? The sand clouds felt gritty, scraping by, like that.

He descended rapidly, cutting on the Seabird's flood lights. All at once, something shot past him. Many somethings, sleek and swift. A pod of Sea Base dolphins, swinging around to shelter in Thunderbird 4's wake. He could feel them, riding along so close beside him that they brushed his hull, their shrill clicks penetrating metal, air and aquanaut.

"Sea Base, from Thunderbird 4," Gordon called, aware that the comm had been pressed, but not feeling himself do it. Thanks to Hackenbacker's incessant tinkering, he received more input from the sub than he did from his own body.

"I'm comin' in from the north, about a kilometer out, with a few of your watch dogs. Thunderbird 2 will proceed t' Curacao, stoppin' by periodically t' help with surface pickups."

The response was a series of pulses which seemed to sink directly into his mind and convert there to a tense, weary voice; Commander Carlin's.

"Glad you guys could make it. Thanks again for answering the call. We need you first at Coral Sea's main docking tower, Thunderbird 4. The pad's obstructed by wreckage, and we've got about fifty people trapped by rising water. No way to get to them, as the situation stands. Come on in, follow frequency beacon 135.27-niner, and watch your back. Something out there's been ripping dolphins and fighter subs to ragged chunks."

"Understood, Sir, and thanks f'r th' heads up."

_'Mental note,' _

…as yet another frightened, half-drowned cetacean streaked from hiding to shelter beneath the yellow sub (it seemed they were calling their mates),

…'_lights off, eyes open, and rig for as silent-bloody-running as damn well possible'._


	7. Chapter 7: Deep Space

7

_Tracy Island-_

After Thunderbird 2 performed a quick 'turn and burn' landing and drop-off, Alan seized TinTin's arm and hauled her between false palm trees to the Cliffside hangar. His brother, Virgil, had returned to the island just long enough to ditch his two young passengers and switch pods. The process could be accomplished outside, despite all the rain, thanks to the maze of lifts, trapdoors and access tunnels that underlay her runway. Thunderbird 2 rumbled up to the right spot, laid her old pod like a dragon's egg, then rose to await its removal and the hydraulic ascent of another. In this case, pod 4. Ten minutes, tops.

Next, he'd be off to Europe, for Gordon. At this point, Virgil had been in the air for over 15 hours, and the strain was beginning to show. He'd been sort of brusque, Alan thought, about ordering them off the plane.

Alan was pretty exhausted, himself, but doing his best to conceal it. He'd pulled people out of the water until the rescues… downed planes, capsized boats, washed-out bridges… began to blur; the crowd becoming a single, protean victim with death-grip hands, chilly flesh and frightened eyes.

'_Save me',_it seemed to cry,clinging to shattered hulls and floating junk, '_or go down with me'._ Dang, but he was beginning to hate the ocean…!

Alan Tracy usually glowed with confidence. Now, though, he was tired and cold, had spent many hours rescuing victims from the darkest and loneliest of graves. And the day wasn't over…

TinTin was quiet (mad at him, the youngest brother supposed), robbing Alan of a much-needed sounding board. She stumbled, crossing the threshold.

"C'mon, T," he grumped, "snap out of it. It wasn't _that _bad."

She looked, with her wet, short hair and circled eyes, like something Death had not only refused to warm over, but tossed out with the trash.

"Je m'excuse, Alain…" she muttered, after Thunderbird 2 roared off, again. "I have a bad head."

Their sodden clothing steamed when the two teenagers stepped from tropical downpour to climate controlled hangar. TinTin began to shiver. For just a minute, Alan was irritated; her evident weakness, when he was already worried, irked the boy. Then, he felt bad for her. After all, she was just a girl…

Gallantly, he seized the blue drop-cloth from one of Brains' yawn-worthy contraptions, swirled it through the air like a matador's cape, and settled it about her drooping shoulders.

"Luxuriate, Mam'selle," he commanded, striking a dramatic pose and affected French accent, "…in ze warmth and comfort of ze penelon shawl! Very nice, no?"

He sounded just like Francois, Lady Penelope's favorite designer.

TinTin giggled, hugging the 'shawl' a little closer. Alan was, yes, obtuse and self-absorbed, but sometimes (just a little) he could also be rather sweet.

They dripped across the big, echoing hangar, weaving among tall gantries, and pausing occasionally to allow trains of maintenance robots the right-of-way. In here, the air was cool and dry. Perfectly calm, but for insect-like clicks and hummings.

Only the overhead lights' intermittent flickering betrayed the tempest that raged outside. It was getting worse.

One hand firmly planted on TinTin's left shoulder, Alan hurried her along. He had no desire to slip on the smooth concrete floor, but didn't want to be stuck in this windowless cavern if the lights went out, either. TinTin sneezed and grumbled, but wobbled a little faster, nonetheless.

Alan hadn't said anything about the girl's raggedly chopped hair, mostly because TinTin/_hair_ versus TinTin/_no hair_ hardly mattered compared with Gordon's confusing behavior, what he'd seen bubbling out of the ocean, and getting dad to agree to home schooling. A little hair, more or less, barely registered on the 'Alan-meter'. The truly chilling possibility, that they might send him to _Wharton_, was to be plotted against with every weapon in his teen-aged arsenal.

'_Hair! Girly heartache. Yeah,_ _right.'_

They crossed the hangar to the second, bottom-level, access door. The lights did go out, once, but the island's generators cut on again almost immediately, micro-welded by swift robots. The pair started up the metal staircase that led to Jeff Tracy's office, waking the echoes with their heavy-footed clomping.

At the top, Alan blanked on the access code, and his water-shriveled hands confused the palm print scanner. In short, the office door wouldn't open.

Frustrated, Alan kicked the thing, getting very little satisfaction from the resulting scuff mark and sore toes. At his side, leaning heavily and half asleep, TinTin murmured something that sounded like,

"Peanut butter lipstick…"

Alan was all set to get mad, when he caught a sideways glimpse of the maintenance tunnel he'd crawled through to give Gordon his first glimpse of Thunderbird 2. In all the resulting furor, they'd nearly been killed. Remembering, Alan grinned.

'_Heh. Good times.'_

And he wished, suddenly, that Gordon was there, and Fermat, too; that the four of them (_yeah, you had to count the chick_) were working this out, together.

They _weren't_ here, though. The door _was._ Wiping his white and wrinkly hand on sodden uniform pants, Alan tried the palm scanner again, mashing his hand to the black square as hard as he could. (To flatten out all the soggy-wrinkles.)

The door opened, all right. From the inside. It was his mom, with towels, drinks and food.

"Awesome," he breathed, seizing an over-stuffed egg salad sandwich and a bottle of purple Gatorade. Shoving food in his mouth, Alan tried to simultaneously towel off, chew, kiss his mother's cheek, and thrust TinTin at her.

"How's oo ahm?" He managed to gust out, not spraying too badly.

"Better, Sweetie, thank you," Gennine responded. "Mr. Hackenbacker laser welded it for me. It hardly hurts at all, now."

"Cool. Can I have another sandwich?"

Gennine smiled at her son, proud and concerned together. He looked worn, she thought. His blond hair was crusted with salt; his eyes were red, and his voice hoarse from shouting. But the wide stance and full cheeks were scrappy-loveable as ever. He'd do.

TinTin, on the other hand, seemed much less alert. She held her sandwich by a corner, blinking at the lumps of yellow filling that dripped onto the stair landing. Ordinarily, Gennine would have swooped over to wipe up the mess. Here, though, she'd learned not to bother.

Projected from above, a glowing red grid appeared on the floor around the spilt food, precisely identifying its location for the house computer. Moments later, a spidery cleaning mech clattered down the wall, incinerated TinTin's spill, then swarmed off along a handy metal pipe.

Gennine took the sandwich from TinTin.

"Never mind, Dear," she soothed, placing her good arm around the cloth-draped girl, "Maybe once you've had a nap."

Didn't happen, though.

Inside the office, Alan's dad, who was down to the crusts of his own meal, was having a very serious discussion with Scott.

"…from _Kuiper, _placed her about 8.2 million miles away," Jeff Tracy was saying, his craggy face grey with exhaustion. Scott swayed a bit, but managed a fair semblance of his usual ramrod posture as he stood beside the wooden desk.

"Understood, Sir. Provided she isn't drifting too rapidly, and we launch _immediately,_ Thunderbird 3 should be able to get there."

Jeff ran a hand through already mussed hair. Lips tightly compressed, he nodded.

"You'll need to cut the engines and drift most of the way, Son, to conserve fuel for your return. On-site maneuvering will be extremely limited. Two or three short burns, at best."

And then he said, for the Times Square incident was just beginning to hit the news,

"Take Alan with you… TinTin, as well, if she feels up to it. Kyrano's given the go-ahead, and this job is going to require two pilots and a space walk. Be very careful, and for God's sake, hurry."

His brown eyes flicked over to the flat-screen TV, then returned to his eldest son's grim, handsome face.

"Something may have gone wrong with John's mission. No real word yet. If _anyone _else could reach _Kuiper…_"

Jeff refocused,gave himself a shake, and resumed briskly,

"Just make it quick. Over to _Kuiper _for survivors, then home. I'll contact Riley, at the Moon Station, in case you fall short and need a second-choice landing spot."

He hadn't any grand-sounding exhortations about _'toughest mission we've ever faced' _to add. Just,

"Fly safe."

A brief handshake and quiet,

"Yes, Sir,"

…closed the briefing. The Tracys were not a particularly demonstrative clan, and sometimes, Jeff regretted this. Especially, now.

_"C'mon, T," _Alan whispered after downing the entire contents of a second Gatorade bottle, _"Get up!"_

The girl had collapsed on the fireside settee, getting rain water all over Jeff's Moroccan leather upholstery.

_"You can sleep on the way!" _

She managed a drowsy yawn, but it was Scott who drew TinTin to her feet; carefully, because even in straits like these, he remained a gentleman. Glancing at his younger brother, who'd given his mother a final, red-faced kiss and a lot of promises, the fighter pilot said,

"Let's go save some cosmonauts, Junior."

_Trenton, NJ, Underground-_

_'Like a relay race in hell,' _John thought disgustedly, staring at the computer screen, _'just one damned thing after another.'_

He'd located the source of the hacks that frightened Drew into breaking her four-year silence. Guy named Cooper Fielding, currently inhabiting one of those comfy rooms with the downy-soft walls. Interesting, and far from the end of the line.

John had a sort of 'investigative rule of thumb': _follow the money._

Someone had hired Fielding, setting him up with a damn fancy set of attack boxes and a super-fast, almost untraceable internet connection. _'Someone'_ had deep pockets, and a US government credit account, which John traced to one 'Vicente Vargas'. _He _was now occupying a refrigerated berth at the DC coroner's office.

According to the police files John had hacked, he'd been found in the trunk of him employer's car, shot to death; one bullet, from behind, close range. Nor did the chain end there.

Vargas' employer was none other than Lamar Stennis, the senator whose televised press conference he'd switched off, earlier. Apparently, Stennis had admitted being a terrorist mastermind, then committed suicide on national television. Not before announcing warmly that his organization, 'The Red Path', was under new management. Question was… whose?

Whose silent string-pulling had resulted in one gibbering mental patient and two perforated corpses? A thorny problem, that one, because it was at this precise point that the money dried up.

Whoever provoked Stennis to suicide, killed Vargas and drove Fielding insane wasn't writing any checks. Right. So, where did that leave him?

John Tracy wasn't much given to 'intuition', but no matter how he put the pieces together, the only answer he got was the Hood. Who else had the requisite motive, ability and sheer, ugly ruthlessness? The man had made twisted use of his own niece, once. Why not a politician? And, Five had said that the Hood was back, returned to life by the same probability shift that moved _Endurance _from Mars to New York City.

As problems went, it was running neck and neck with several others, such as why Denice seemed completely at ease with a 19-year old John Tracy, one who couldn't _possibly _have been old enough to fly a Mars mission. In fact, he had to remind her constantly that he was an astronaut… and worse yet, remind himself. Certain events were beginning to fade. For awhile, he'd decided to keep notes, write everything down. Until strange patterns began turning up in the placement of capital '_A_'s and lower-case '_q_'s, that is. Safer, maybe, to quit writing, no matter how much was temporarilylost to shifting realities.

John gazed at the glowing computer screen, tapping a pencil and re-reading a minutely detailed police report. Lots of facts, no answers. But... if the Hood _was_ controlling Red Path, he had to be sending orders and making decisions, leaving some kind of 'click trail'. Not the sort that his pursuer could follow by ordinary means, though.

Coming to a decision, John pushed the squeaking office chair away from Denice's work station, and stood up. He'd shifted the piled junk, a bit. Now there was a straight path between computer, bed and pass-through.

As he turned away from the desk, John's eye chanced to fall upon the 'random' marks he'd made, tapping his pencil. Instead of a meaningless scatter, the graphite dashes formed a halfway recognizable pattern. Some of the spots were darker than others, as though closer to the viewer, some a little smudged, as if moving. At once alien and familiar, it was a message or equation of some sort; something his former body had been destroyed to remove. Something he'd lost Mars for.

With a sudden, violent move, John tore the marked sheet from DNC's notebook, wadded the paper and hurled it into the hanging grocery bag that served as a garbage can. Then, shoving away confusion, and all its ugly friends, he went up front. Only a curtain of plastic strips separated living quarters from work place. The real security was out front; invisible and unsleeping.

Denice looked up from adjusting her display case. She'd just received a 'misdirected' box of wireless routers. High-end, experimental stuff, meant for military use. As John stepped into her shop, DNC gave him a brief, companionable nod.

"What's up, guy?" She asked him, shutting the glass-topped case. With a tall metal cabinet and titanium alloy laptop, the case and its altered goods made up her whole store. Nice place, really, for the underground. She'd built into the snug, solid corner between a steel support pylon and a concrete load-bearing wall. Prime real estate.

The wall was painted a certain shade of green, with silver lines and dots resembling the engraved paths on a circuit board. The pylon she'd rigged to look like streams of flowing data.

"You need something?"

John nodded, indicating an object on the bottom shelf of the display case.

"The cyberlink." An even rarer device, and handmade.

DNC's dark eyebrows lifted slightly. Almost, she smiled; chipped teeth gleaming briefly against tan skin.

"You back in business, K?"

Although, as she'd told him once, she didn't care for the male species, as a whole…

_"Denice," she'd introduced herself, fiercely. "D-E-N-I-C-E. Den-iss. Got it? And I don't like men."_

_To which he'd replied, a little confusedly,_

"_Neither do I," earning himself a harder backslap than even Virgil could deliver._

…John was a special case, unswervingly loyal, even in the face of blackmail and threatened imprisonment. He shook his blond head in response to her question.

"No. I gave my word. I'm just looking for someone."

Denice hesitated, one hand on the locked display case.

"Sure you don't want to wait till I close up, John? It ain't safe jacking all the way in like that, with no one there to watch you."

But he shrugged off her concern, saying,

"I'll be fine, and so will the link. This won't take long, I promise."

_Thunderbird 3, the cockpit, somewhat earlier-_

She launched like a bolt from the gods, flung, not out of the heavens, but into them. Thunderbird 1 was fast, Thunderbird 2 powerful, 4 able to endure the crushing pressure of the depths. But Thunderbird 3, rising on a plume of golden flame, was a spaceship; sleek, swift and graceful.

Into the storm she launched, drawing spears of lightning that rode her contrail straight down to the roundhouse. This time, the lights really _did_ go out, and stayed that way.

Not that the three aboard ship noticed. Beyond a handful of flickering instruments, the power surge scarcely affected them. TinTin, strapped into a couch in the 'lounge', concentrated as best she could on the staticky computer screen. Brains had uploaded every file, press release and technical spec available on _Kuiper. _At the moment, however, it was just about impossible to do any reading. Between the shaking, the thunderous din and chest-popping pressure, TinTin had all she could do just to complete a thought. The alertness tablets had taken effect, though; that was something.

Up front, Scott and Alan Tracy faced the same struggle. For Scott, it was harder. He was recovering, still, from injuries that had come close to killing him. The nanobots had done their job well, but he was weak yet, and troubled by pains that 3's agitated shaking made worse.

Setting his jaw, Scott kept his blue eyes riveted to the view screen and his hands clenched on the arm rests. At the moment, there wasn't much flying to be done. Like any rocket, anywhere, 3's initial launch was pretty much _'point, shoot and pray'_.

Beside him, strapped into the copilot's couch, Alan was actually whooping aloud (15 years old and going into space on a heroic mission- how much better could it get?). Tired or not, he wouldn't have missed it, or noticed much else.

The shaking eased as Thunderbird 3 broke the clawed grip of gravity. Rising, she shrugged the storm clouds off like a dropped shawl, and emerged into peace and blackness. The stars shone forth, and angry Mars, burning like crystals.

Now Scott took a hand in things, checking telemetry from the island and _Kuiper _before gimbaling the rockets and ending the burn. Fuel, as Jeff had indicated, was going to be painfully tight. Thunderbird 3 continued to spin, following the last applied force. It would be several hours before another correction was needed.

"Alan," Scott began, looking over at his entranced younger brother, "you and TinTin are going to be pulling a lot of the weight, this time out."

Alan managed to tear his eyes from the view screen for a whole, what… three seconds? Much buoyed by food, spaceflight and alertness tabs, he blurted,

_"Huh?_ Yeah, okay. Weight, gotcha."

There was internal gravity, thanks to something very big spinning really fast (Alan wasn't too clear on the details, but it sounded scientific) at the center of the ship. Didn't quite kill that swooping, roller coaster thrill, though. According to the cabin monitors, gravity had dropped to 2/3 Earth normal. His golden hair fluffed out rather entertainingly. Reflected in the windows, he looked _poofy._

"I'm serious, Al."

That got the boy's attention; he'd never merited a nickname, before. Not one he _wanted,_ anyway. 'Junior' and 'Brat' didn't count.

Scott continued gravely, as Thunderbird 3 rolled on, and the Earth's curvingrim slipped from the bottom, to top, of their forwardview screen,

"I didn't want to say anything, before, but I'm not in as good condition as I led dad to believe. A lot of this is going to devolve on you and TinTin. I'll provide what help I can, and continue to mend, but… _damn, I hate this!"_

The last time he'd been forced to let one of the boys take the lead, Gordon had nearly ended up entombed in a sunken freighter. (Bad back, worse planning; but then, as now, what else could he do?)

Said Alan, as the rear hatch slid open and TinTin hurtled in,

"_Dude_. Be, like, at ease. This rescue is _so _handled. You put us there, the chick locates our targets, and I pick 'em up. Uno, dos, tres. Seriously, what could go wrong?"

_Wharton Academy, a little later-_

As the crowd of boys began filing out of their stone dining hall, Fermat, Sam and Daniel hung back, a bit. If they timed it just right, they might slip away between the last wave of students and their shepherding proctors. Clearly, this was no time for assembly, or classes, either. This was an emergency.

All at once, though, Daniel Solomon got a notion. Signaling Sam and Fermat, he took a deep breath, then approached Anne Wilde. As she stood rather near, quietly admonishing the massed boys to remember their umbrellas, this took no more than a second or two.

"Miss Wilde…?" He ventured, screwing up courage from sheer desperation. In weather like this, they had to have a real driver. They _had_ to have an adult along; someone trustworthy.

The young history teacher looked down and around, her worried grey eyes softening at the sight of Daniel's face. She whipped her own umbrella around to 'port arms', then brought it down to tap his shoulders, one at a time, like a queen knighting a bold squire on the eve of battle.

Illuminated by lightning-flash and wall lamps, her ash-blonde hair looked almost white.

"Say on, Goode Sir Daniel. What wouldst thou?"

Her flowery language raised the ghost of a smile from Daniel Solomon.

"Ma'am," he began, gaining confidence, "we _really _need your help, and so do the astronauts."


	8. Chapter 8: Turbulence

Christmas vacation ought to mean more time... strangely, however, it hasn't. Sorry so late, and thanks for the kind reviews.

8

_Kennedy Space Center, Florida-_

If Roger Thorpe had one thing going for him, it was mass. The U.S. Marine Captain was a big man, made even more impressive by his globe-and-anchor bicep tattoos, and general aura of determination. Also, he wanted out, _now,_ and a few FBI types weren't enough to bar the way.

When Linda Bennett said, _'open the door',_ Thorpe bulled his way forward, turning the knob and shoving through, with the ladies close behind. It wasn't locked, they discovered, but definitely guarded. Four dark-suited special agents immediately converged upon the open portal, protesting the astronauts' emergence in stern, official tones.

_'For your own safety…'_

_'Temporary quarantine…'_

_'Official orders…'_

…etc.

petaQ! Prison was prison, whether you cooled your heels in the brig, or a NASA medical center, and in neither case was Roger Thorpe having any.

When the first agent _(black male, about 6'2", 215 lbs)_ attempted to herd the three astronauts back to their waiting room, Roger scowled down at the man's mirrored sunglasses, leveled a forefinger at his silk neck-tie and snapped,

"You don't want to do that, Mister. Unless you really want to shoot me, andthe ladies, you're going to get the hell out of our way. I don't give a rat's polished ass about your 'official orders'. I don't see whoever issued them out here risking their butts beside you. And, if we're so contagious, how come they didn't give you guys biohazard suits? Anybody but me got a problem with that?"

The agent hesitated. He was a smart man. He'd had these thoughts, himself. Even worse, Agent Rutherford was a quiet fan of the space program, and he didn't want to go down in history as the idiot who'd gunned down the Ares III crew. Tough position.

Sensing all this, Roger pressed his advantage.

"Look, you can come with us, if you want. All we're doing is heading back down to bio/med for a look at our files. Hell, call it on in! Invite your friends; we'll make it a party. But this is America, and we've got a right to know what's happened to us… Or, don't you work for the same government?"

A low blow, but effective. Linda stifled a sudden grin. She couldn't have put it any better, though the sight of a strapping young man like Thorpe using persuasion, rather than force, was kind of funny. Nerves, she supposed.

At any rate, their guards didn't call for backup, merely stepping aside with a quiet,

"Go ahead, Sir… Ladies,"

…and falling in behind them. So, three astronauts, led by Doctor Bennett and followed by the FBI, started walking. Before facing Gene, or _(God help them)_ some witch-hunting government investigation team, she needed to dig up a few key facts. Where, for example, were Pete and John? Held elsewhere? And, if so, why? Had they simply failed to call in yet, or had something more serious happened?

No less importantly, what had being transferred almost fifty million miles done to the crew's minds and bodies? She'd heard rumors, seen video clips on Dan's little TV, back at the Get-n-Go. Obviously, _Endurance_ hadn't fared as well as her crew.

What if… and here, for an instant, Linda's thoughts flinched away… what if not everyone had made it off the ship? Somehow, she had to find out.

Striding along a narrow, grey-carpeted passage, amid fluorescent light panels and poster-sized photos of previous space shots, Linda forged her priorities.

First, what and where: what condition were they all in, and where, actually, were they? Linda was scientist enough to know about the parallel worlds theory. What evidence did she have that their mysterious translocator had set them back on the same Earth they'd left? True, everyone seemed to recognize them, but might subtle differences begin to show, with time?

Next, how: what had done all this? The alien computer John had discovered? Or, had their first diggings at the Argyre Basin triggered some kind of ancient defense system?

And, most important of all, could the process be reversed? Could some reaction of theirs bring everything back to normal? Because, more than anything else, Linda wanted all this to be a nightmare. She wanted to wake up on Mars, with…

_Anyway._ She was suddenly very alone and deeply worried, with the weight of a mission and two missing crewmates on her slim shoulders. A harsh burden, but not impossible… and one she meant to wrangle all the way across the finish line. But, answers first, Linda decided; then action.

Behind her, Kim Cho whispered something to Roger, her voice sounding pensive and sad. The exobiologist had calmed considerably since reuniting with her best friend and fiancé, but concern for the others was a constant, twisting knot. They'd been through so much together…

The selection process, the classes, training and simulations; all guided and watched over by Pete McCord, hero of an earlier generation. They'd run miles along the white sand beaches of the Cape, competed fiercely with other candidate groups… and watched one comrade after another wash out.

Cho had felt sorry for them; those that didn't make it, those that never got to fly. Yet, if John Tracy had failed, if he'd gotten the awful _'We regret to inform you…'_ letter, he'd be home now, and safe. Or, had Pete McCord's rising blood pressure proven untreatable, the mission commander would have been transferred to admin, or public relations…

…having never succeeded. Having never touched Mars.

Like the mythical choice placed by the gods before Achilles, of a short and glorious life, or one long and unremembered. Who was to say which path was the wiser? For every Achilles and Penthesilea, there were a thousand _what's-her-name_s, those who bore the kids, raised the crops and repaired the chariots. The world needed them, too.

Kim Cho had made her own choice, and would pick the same road again, given the option. She was an astronaut and a scientist, and she refused to be lied to, or prevented from helping a friend.

Squeezing Roger's hand, she followed Linda Bennett into an out-of-the-way research lab, one with full data access, and a single attending technician. Confused, the fellow stepped away from his computer work station, hands fluttering like startled birds. Agent Rutherford drew him aside, giving Linda, Cho and Roger time to work. One way or another, they were going to have the truth.

_Wharton Academy-_

Miss Wilde had listened silently, the geography of her facial muscles shifting from skeptical to concerned, as first Daniel, then Fermat and Sam attempted to explain the danger John Tracy was in, and why.

Every time lightning flashed, rivulet shadows from the dining hall's long windows were projected onto her face and body, giving Anne the runny look of a wax effigy in serious trouble. Finally, the boys wrapped up their plea, stood anxiously waiting.

Miss Wilde was quiet a bit longer. Then, she shook her blonde head.

"That," the young history teacher said, "is certainly the strangest story I've ever heard. I'd be convinced that you'd all three lost your minds… if we didn't have a charred spaceship in Times Square, and all those missing astronauts. But…"

Her grey eyes were troubled, now,

"…You're _sure _about this?"

Daniel nodded vigorously, saying,

"Yes, Ma'am. I made up this story, but I didn't mean for it to really happen, and I have to think of a way to fix things, because there's worse to come, if it isn't stopped. We've got to find John Tracy, protect him from the Hood, and then do something about this storm. And… well, you're the only one we trusted to ask for help."

The young woman (a very goddess to Daniel, though others might have said she was a little bony) pursed her lips.

"Not without the informed consent of at least one parent, Daniel. I know your families have all their forms on file, but one of you,"

She looked around at the three boys, arrayed before her in the echoing stone hall,

"…needs to call mom, dad or Uncle Joe for research-trip permission. Otherwise, _no._ And that's final."

As Wharton was a residential school, most of its students had an off-campus consent form already signed and filed away, but each foray had to be cleared with a parent or guardian, first. Many of the boys' parents were famous, wealthy and terribly busy. They therefore made agreement among themselves as to who could sign for which child. In this manner, time was saved, and no one got pulled out of a critical meeting for something as trifling as field-trip permission. Hiram Hackenbacker had taken advantage of the option, as had Judith Solomon, and Samuel Nakamura's distant parents.

The boys looked at each other.

"My mother," Sam began, after a brief pause, "would be very difficult to reach, just now. She's been unwell, and is probably quite… occupied."

An odd statement, which he refused to amend. And Fermat realized, suddenly, how little he actually knew about Sam Nakamura. They'd been school mates forover a year, now, and fast friends besides, but beyond that…?

Daniel was looking uncomfortable, shifting his weight from foot to foot like he needed a toilet.

"I don't even want to think about explaining all this to _my _mom," he admitted. "She wouldn't get it, except to fuss about the 'danger' and ask half a million pointless questions. She never listens, but she never shuts up, either. I mean, I love her… but frankly, we'd be better off asking the _headmaster _for approval."

And that left Fermat. Quietly, the brown-haired boy pulled out his cell phone. He was in a tearing hurry, the need was glaringly obvious, but adults, even relatively cool ones, were unable to focus on the important things. They required permission slips, assurances, paychecks and good performance ratings.

_(Reason number 10 to the 52nd power why Fermat and his buddies intended to start their own software company; freedom to stay young.)_

His father picked up at once, pale-faced and grim. Evidently, he'd scanned the computer scenario. Though the ongoing storm played havoc with reception, they managed a swift conference.

"H- Hi, Dad," Fermat greeted the elder Hackenbacker. It was funny, but on seeing him, his father's blue eyes contained, always, a hint of surprised joy, as though Fermat was a wonderful and unexpected Christmas present.

He'd asked about that, once, and been pulled in for a long, warm hug.

"If I try very hard, Son," _(in Fermat's memories, his father never stuttered)_ "I can just about imagine what it would be, ah… be like to not have you with me. Very lonely. Very sad. I miss your mother, and always, ah… always will, but at least we're together, you and I."

And, somehow, with the Tracys as adopted family, they'd made that enough.

That _'pinch me, I'm dreaming'_ look was there, again, beneath the worry in his father's eyes, as Dr. Hackenbacker returned Fermat's greeting.

"H- Hello, Son. Wh- what, ah… what's going on? Are you s- safe?"

"Y- Yes, Dad. I'm… okay, but… I need p- permission… to leave campus, with… Daniel and Sam and… M- Miss Wilde."

"Why?" His father's gaze was serious, and iron calm.

Fermat, tip-toeing delicately around the giant secret that he and his father defended, replied with a swift, slightly edited version of the Princeton rescue plan. At the end, he blurted,

"But, it w- would be… better, Dad, if y- you were… were there, t- too."

In Fermat's adoring eyes, not even the Hood could stand up to his brilliant father.

"I was p- planning on it, Son. You, ah… you have m- my permission t- to drive with, ah… with a t- teacher to Princeton University. Try to f- find John b- before the Hood d- does, but _do not_ engage, if _he_ gets there, f- first. W- We don't n- need _multiple _hostages. I'll t- tell Mr. Tracy, and, ah… and alert the l- local authorities. John sh- should be easy to, ah… to spot. After all, he's q- quite famous, now."

Something bothered Fermat about this, some change he vaguely recalled noticing, but couldn't focus on well enough to describe. Oddly, the more he tried to think about John Tracy, the less certain he became of the young man's age or appearance. But his father was speaking, again, derailing Fermat's train of thought. To the teacher, Brains said,

"I'm faxing written p- permission, a big d- donation and a back-dated trip request to, ah… to the headmaster's office, even as w- we speak, Ma'am, and I, ah… I th- thank you f- for your help. Please t- take the turnpike, and l- leave quickly, before the storm g- gets, ah… gets any worse."

"Of course, Dr. Hackenbacker," she replied, lower lip flushing slightly red where she'd bitten it. Miss Wilde was a creature of sudden drama and surging emotions quite at odds with her misty-pale looks. A chance to help save an astronaut was too good to pass up, especially when regular classes had been cancelled for the day.

"I'll keep the boys out of trouble, Sir, I promise. All we'll do is _look _for John Tracy. As you say, he should be simple enough to find."

If they ever got _started_ that is. Once won over, she was all enthusiasm.

Brains nodded, as reluctant as the teacher was anxious. It was his son he was sending forth, after all; something that had happened just once or twice before. Something Jeff Tracy did nearly every day.

"R- right. Good l- luck to, ah… to you all, and be careful. I'm, ah… I'm on m- my way."

It was an emboldened and much warmed Fermat who put away his cell phone and set off to battle chaos. Meanwhile, Daniel turned his face up to the history teacher's, extended a courtly arm and said,

"Shall we?"

As the four of them left Stanton Hall, crowded beneath one black umbrella, Sam shouted over wind and rain and crashing lightning,

"I know someone who can help us search, once we've reached Princeton!"

_Curacao-_

Virgil Tracy, working alone, had already loaded several villages' worth of refugees. Leaving Willemstad airport to the National Guard and U.S. Air Force, he brought Thunderbird 2 roaring down on the highest spot accessible to plane and person alike, a rumpled mountainside, velvety-black with tossing foliage. Mount Christoffel. The rain _bucketed_ down, more like an upended ocean than a mere storm, yet the people found their way.

Alerted by local news crews, endless streams of islanders poured over Thunderbird 2's launch ramp. Drenched, tired and grateful, they ranged from fisherman and shop clerks to confused tourists. One woman staggered aboard clutching a yapping, bedraggled poodle which Virgil pretended not to see. Not since Persia had he refused refuge to an animal.

Minding the time, one eye on the snarling weather, Virgil stood at the base of the ramp and directed traffic. The sodden mountainside wouldn't hold forever, but the people just kept coming, and he couldn't leave them. Not so long as there was a single crevice where one more person might fit.

Through it all, burned the knowledge that one of his brothers was in desperate trouble, perhaps dying, with Virgil and the others unable to help. For now.

If his amazing luck held, though… if he could stay alert, keep the crowd moving and get the job done… if Gordon handled _his _end, they still might be able to…

Virgil stopped thinking for a moment, to help a young woman up the slippery launch ramp. With her dark skin and graceful build, she reminded him of the twins. Of Teena, anyhow; Shari was never quiet that long.

A strong hand beneath her elbow guided the woman over the ramp to safety. She kissed his unshaven cheek by way of thanks, full lips brushing warm against rain-chilled flesh.

…and there was another 'post card', one of those memories Virgil saved to be brought out when he was troubled, or hurt, or merely bored. Like scenes of any fishing trip, or Teena caught in moonlight feeding the horses, or the time John constructed that crazy-ass Rube Goldberg 'ladder' to reach the paints down for him…

Virgil tugged his waterproof a little tighter, squinting against a sudden lightning flash, and fighting the urge to sneeze. Strangely, for an instant there, he'd imagined John as his _younger _brother. But, he was having difficulty keeping his thoughts in order, and this was no time for waking dreams. Not when the night went on and on, the rain kept lashing, and so many frightened people needed a way off this rapidly flooding island. Listening to the boom and surge of rising water, Virgil shrugged off his doubts, and fought on.

_Below the surface, Sea Base Alpha-_

Very nearly, they were there. Almost, they'd made it to the underwater city and its big, safe dolphin port. Thunderbird 4 and her air-starved escorts cut downward through dark, chilly waters. He could feel the increased pressure, like a slick and icy fist about his hull. Not painful, exactly. Just… strange.

Ahead of him glowed the largest dome, Coral Sea. It gleamed softly atop the grey seamount, a great half-pearl filled with light and life. Gordon had been there once before, on a long-ago class outing. Only then, the lacy steel docking towers hadn't been twisted and bent, nor ruptured fighter-subs piled like dead wasps against the curving glass. Every so often, rising water hit an exposed electrical main, causing a loud crack, and brief, fading tingle. Level by level, the lights were going out, casting the surrounding waters into growing shadow. All else was still, though, which struck the young aquanaut as decidedly odd. There should have been escape pods and life rafts… right?

Uneasy, still trying to remain small and inconspicuous, Gordon made for a cave about thirty feet below the top of the mountain. If memory served, it opened onto Coral Sea's main dolphin pool, and breathable air.

Eyes on the smoothly machined cave mouth, mind on the torn fighter-subs, Gordon was startled by a sudden upwelling. It was a massive pressure wave, like wind stirred by a hurtling train.

The dolphins should have broken ranks, but they didn't. Gordon should have switched on the waterbird's force field, creating a frictionless pseudo-hull that would have let him jet away at hyper-sonic speeds. Never happened.

What stopped him was simply this: the dolphins. Each had the mind of an eight-year old child and the friendly, loyal nature of a golden retriever. They could understand sign language, and genuinely seemed to believe that 'rescue' meant them, too.

He increased speed, playing for time. Pushing cold and hard against Thunderbird 4's flat belly, the pressure wave shoved her off course, away from the cave mouth. The dolphins' clicking had risen to a panicked crescendo. They stayed with him, though, steadfast to the last.

Rising like a spear through black water, something was coming.

_Deep space, Thunderbird 3-_

Mumbling something about a cat nap, Scott had fallen asleep. With three hours to go before the next burn and loads of meds to work off, Alan let him stay that way.

Not that he had much experience in the matter, but Scott-unconscious seemed a lot easier to deal with than Scott-awake. Even if he _did_ talk in his sleep. Fighter pilot stuff, mostly; he sounded like the voice-overs in some of Alan's favorite video games, only, like, _real_.

Earth, the boy noticed, checking out the rear camera, was getting smaller. About the size of a basketball, now; something you could palm, and put a nice arc on. Grinning, he mimed a jump shot, and the roar of adoring crowds.

Maybe he should have been nervous, or something, but instead Alan was thrilled. Okay… _tired _and thrilled. Still, he couldn't help wishing that there was someone around to brag to, who wasn't in the family, and didn't get to do this all the time. Even Gordon, who never went up in 3 if he could help it, had done it all before. He'd have listened, though. He always did.

As Scott was ordering his phantom wingmen to close formation, TinTin turned away from her computer station, looking all serious and crap. Probably had bad news, too, which would mean waking Scott.

On the deeply-flawed theory that anything he didn't find out about, couldn't affect him _(he never liked checking out the surf advisories or coral depths, either)_, Alan decided to distract her. All at once turning on his best 'hot-boy' grin, Alan gave TinTin the eye and said,

"Hey, cupcake… nice hair."

Really, he'd never seen anybody's face do all those interesting things, and it would have been massively funny, if he hadn't gotten this sudden, major headache, _then_ had to sprint for the bathroom, clutching his rumbling guts.

Alan was never afterward quite so keen on egg salad, practical jokes, or discussing girls' haircuts. As it turned out, though, TinTin _did_ have bad news, and it very much affected them all.

_Princeton University, some years earlier-_

Once his grandfather had left, life settled into a sort of routine. True to his earlier decision, John went very rarely to his eating club, the Tiger Inn.

Instead, he subsisted on frozen pizzas, orange soda, care packages and vending machines, when he bothered to eat, at all.

At the dim bottom level of the physics building, beside a hidden access to the Underground, there stood a line of snack and soda machines. Humming and glowing, filled with easy to manage, singly-flavored foods and _always_ open for business, the machines pretty much kept him alive.

They weren't as much visited as some of the other 'basement restaurants', due to a rumored phantom. There was a superstition in the science and math departments that if you visited the phys-building vending machines and didn't leave something behind for the phantom, you'd fail your next n + 1 exams ('n' being equal to the number of items you'd purchased).

Well, John could afford the food offering, and preferred solitude, anyway, so basement row became his favorite eating spot. He'd sit on a wooden bench in the corner beside the Coke machine, reading in its cheery reddish glow, and warmed by excess heat escaping the coils in back. Machines, like horses, made pleasant, predictable sounds, and never expected conversation. It was a good place to go, like the stables had been, or the Holder laundry annex, in the bleak hours between _'late'_ and _'too damn early'_.

A strange thing happened one night, though. Morning, rather… it was close to 2 AM when John wandered into the basement again, deeply absorbed in a quantum-gravitation text, but hungry enough to leave the dorm.

Someone had written on one of the bare concrete walls. Directly across from the row of vending machines, in bold strokes of a black marker, persons unknown had scrawled a very long, very intricate equation.

Forgetting hunger and book, alike, John stepped closer. He read the pretty thing like a hieroglyphic inscription, letting the variables, the complex numbers and constants form a picture in his mind.

_Turbulence_, he decided after a moment, as it related to surface tension and viscosity of a hypothetical diatomic fluid at zero degrees Celsius. Interesting. Still…

He pulled forth a pencil, carefully crossing out one of the terms _(about 4 feet off the brown linoleum floor, and two away from the double doors, below an old heating duct)_ and replacing it with a fiendish alternative. Now, the mythical fluid would have to do its rocking and rolling in 28 dimensions. Solve that one.

But the next day, solved it was, with a twist or two thrown in, for good measure. Literally. With a deft shuffling of coefficients, the entire system was now _spinning,_ velocity given, observer assumed to have no effect. There were three yellow sticky-notes attached to the wall around the equation; advice from other students. Apparently, he wasn't the only one who came down here to think, nor the first to be challenged so.

Facing a problem like this one, back on his grandparents' ranch, he'd have gone for a ride. Fetched tack and rifle, whistled Posey up, and ridden the roan mare along wind-swept ridge and winding gully, till the solution came. Here he paced beneath winking fluorescents, drank orange soda, and thought. _Hard._

In his head, the fields and numbers tumbled. They had textures. Their impact, as coefficient raised variable, and derivative scraped curve, made noises. There were things spiraling off of that equation that made no logical sense, had no earthly use… but, _damn,_ they were beautiful. Flocks of brightly colored, geometric birds whose songs were curves and branes and vortices.

It was the vortices that did the trick. All at once, just barely, he could grasp the notion of a rotating, 28th dimensional whirlpool, and how to describe what would happen to the poor, luckless bastard who got sucked inside.

It was hard to hold the thought steady and write at the same time, but he managed, fighting off distraction from the marker's reedy squeak and sharp scent.

It said something about the physics department that no one questioned John's right to deface their basement walls with a mathematical debate, or the phantom's right to lurk there (whoever he actually was). All they did was observe, checking the walls each day for new developments.

One time, at the finish of his solution, John thought up a little twist of his own. He added terms that caused the spinning, liquid universe to be perturbed from outside, by the impact of another, expanding dimension. In his head, the entire sloshing mess attained order, and then rang like a giant bell.

Standing to his right and a little behind, with scratched-up hands tucked into the opposite sleeves of a torn BDU jacket, Autumn Drew shook her head. Harshly dyed hair hid a face tinted in all the colors of gloom.

"Crazy, both of you," she muttered, stalking off to her job at the Firestone library.

He encountered her there some days later, because of a terribly rare book, and too little sleep.


	9. Chapter 9:Drift

This is supposed to be in two parts, due to length... didn't work out that way, though. Doing this whilst de-fragmenting the computer... Now re-re-edited! Slightly new, hardly different! Too much meade!

9

_Princeton University, years earlier-_

The library, several stories tall and built of dark-veined stone, looked like a castle, complete with long, narrow windows and sweeping steps; very imposing amid ancient trees, and an excellent place to spend a blustery Saturday.

He'd gone to the stacks one morning, talking his way around the head librarian with some bullshit story about an overdue research paper. Way at the back, where mummified books breathed leathery dust and faded diagrams, he found something unexpected.

There was a book there… not so old, but the only one in print… authored many years before by a Doctor Dwight Bremmerman. Called _'Temporal-Spatial Navigation in Ten Dimensions'_, it was a densely written treatise on time travel; a how-to, basically, and John was fascinated. The fact that Bremmerman had been a 21-year old post-doc at Princeton, had produced just this one amazing book, then vanished utterly, made the find especially valuable. (To John, at least. No else had ever checked it out, to judge by the book's lily-white signature card.)

John took it away from the physics section, then found himself aquiet window seat with a commanding view of leaf-browned lawns and bare trees. The light outside was weak and watery, filtered through a layer of cloud. He sat down, opened up the book and proceeded to read… himself to sleep.

Until someone kicked the base of the window seat, that is. John woke with a start, nearly dropping the heavy tome. He'd been dreaming about computers, storms and his missing brother… but there was Drew, instead, more disgusted than ever.

She said, narrowing heavily-kohled lids over garnet contacts,

"First the basement, now this. What are you, homeless?"

_Great._

"No," John replied unwillingly, getting to his feet. Drew was in two of his classes, and she worked at the library. He couldn't simply ignore her. "Holder Hall. Moved in last semester."

"Uh-huh," very skeptically. "Coupon day, was it? Or, did the local Knights of Columbus scrape up a scholarship for you? One of those _'Send our Johnny to school'_ deals with the bake sales and car washes?"

He met that artificial ruby stare head on, saying coldly,

"It's paid for, and my name is _'John'_, not 'Johnny'."

She shrugged.

"I'll call you _'Tracy'_. 'John' sounds like something on a toe-tag in the morgue lost-and-found. Let me guess… you were the tenth kid, and they ran out of ideas? Better than 'White Male Infant', I suppose… but not much."

Actually, his mother and Scott _had _called him 'Johnny', while his grandmother stuck with 'John Matthew' or 'Boy', like Granddad. But that was need-to-know information, and this costumed witch didn't qualify. He was about to push past, when she asked,

"You want it?"

_That _threw a truckload of sand in the gears.

"Beg pardon?"

"The… _book,_ Tracy." Slowly and sarcastically spoken, while pointing at Bremmerman's magnum opus. "Would… you… like… to… check out… the… _book?"_

Then, back to her usual biting tones,

"Or, just cuddle it till closing time? I'll tuck you back in and dim the lights, if the two of you would like to be alone."

He'd met something at the ranch trash pit, once, with about the same level of charm. Unfortunately, this time, John hadn't any bear spray, or well-armed brothers. Worse, she was a female. He wasn't supposed to hit females, no matter how richly they deserved it.

"Don't suppose you'd vanish in a puff of smoke, if I make the sign of the cross?" He wondered aloud, stepping carefully around her, "…return to the 7th level of hell, or something?"

The corners of her dark-lipsticked mouth twitched slightly.

"Aww… a sweet little Catholic boy tries his luck in the big city! All this, and a sense of humor, too? Momma must be so proud!"

Normally packed and sorted away, things inside him snap-shuffled, like playing cards with razor edges. He got a little slashed, but when everything settled, the topmost option was the truth.

"She's dead."

And Drew, for once, said nothing. John added, sounding terribly calm,

"She fell, quite awhile ago, with the baby. My father couldn't catch her. He was busy with Scott. She's inaccessible for questioning, now, so there's no way to tell what she'd think of me."

He reported this almost as if it didn't matter. The girl had wrapped skinny arms around herself. After a minute, she asked,

"But, you remember her, right?"

John nodded. Very much, he remembered her.

"And she liked you okay, right up till… you know?"

"I got that impression, yes."

Drew kind of shrugged, then shoved at his left shoulder with an almost-careless hand. Maybe apologetic or maybe she just liked hitting people. No way to tell, with females.

"So, on first principles, an '_a priori'_ argument can be made that she started out pleased, and…well, you made it to Princeton at 17, so…"

"Sixteen," he clarified. Like Drew herself, he was an under-aged 'special student'.

"Okay. Even better. You're a wunderkind farm boy, or something. I'd be pretty impressed, if it was me. I mean, most moms have to make do with spelling bees and model solar systems, y'know? Or, in your case, artistic cattle-branding."

Weird, how a few back-handed compliments could change everything. All at once, in her second-hand clothing and bleak makeup, Autumn Drew seemed less creepy than alone. Like someone determined to snarl, _"I didn't need you, anyway," _to all those turned backs and blank looks.

"Yeah," he said aloud. "I'd like to check it out."

And then, because she seemed confused,

"The _book, _Drew. I'm interested."

Something had been established, however slight. And so, they went downstairs together, to see about _'Temporal-Spatial Navigation'._

_Kennedy Space Center, Florida-_

Her password still worked, allowing Linda Bennett access to her own medical files, and everyone else's. Those of John Tracy and Pete McCord were old, updated last via transmission from Mars. At the time, they'd both been in reasonably good health, though showing predictable signs of increased stress (John with raised pulse and breath rate, suddenly). Nothing more in the last two days, though, and no indication that the two men were being held incommunicado. _Damn._

It had been worth a try…

At her own bio-med screen, Dr. Bennett received a rather large shock. Two, actually.

Scrolling down the page, scanning all those dry, poly-syllabic medical terms, she read the file twice, then checked Dr. Kim's, and that of Roger Thorpe.

Cho read over her shoulder. Roger, too, though he didn't understand most of what he saw.

"So," the Marine asked at last, judging from the women's frowns that something very strange had happened, "what's the diagnosis, Ladies? Are we gonna make it?"

He tried for a humorous tone, but his dark eyes were quite serious. Linda's mouth tightened. She nodded.

"To say the least. It's like we've been completely… not just transported, Roger, but… remade. Right down to the cellular… the _DNA _level. Every protein is properly folded and whirring along, all our telomeres have lengthened… not a single sign of biological wear. _Not one._ It's like someone made a mold of our old bodies, then cast new ones with all-new parts and materials." Nor was that all.

"Then, we're healthy?" Roger inquired, running a hand across his bristling black hair. He badly needed a trim.

"Completely," Linda responded.

"Just squared-away as a soup sandwich," he gusted. "What about Pete and John? Where are…"

It was at this point that Gene Porter walked into the tech station, together with a stocky young chaplain, and NASA's director. Linda cleared the screen, and stood up. At her full height, she barely topped 5'3".

"Gene," she greeted the mission director, giving Father Hughes and Jerry Frasier a wary nod.

Tall and silver haired, with a politician's ready smile, Frasier specialized in fund-raising and public relations. 'Spin', in other words. The Navy Chaplain's presence was far more worrisome. He started to speak, but Gene cut him off with a sharp gesture.

"If you don't mind, Father, this is my job."

Speaking to the federal agents and the still-wondering lab technician, he added,

"Folks, I'd like to clear this room of everyone but Mr. Frasier, the Padre, here, and the astronauts. We're going to need to conference, in private."

A few moments later, he'd gotten his wish. Gene waited until the door latched shut behind Agent Rutherford, whom he trusted to prevent intrusion.

The only sounds, now, were the various hums and chirps of busy computer equipment. Fluorescent lights flickered palely in the windowless room, washing out six complexions. Everyone looked haggard, grim and dog-tired.

Turning to Linda, Roger and Cho, the launch director cleared his throat.

"I've got some news," he began, "which I apologize for taking so long to bring you. The, _um…_ well. I needed to be sure."

At Gene's side, Frasier stirred restlessly; crossing, then un-crossing his long arms.

"Got a couple of phone calls, today. I'll start with the last one. It seems that about two months ago, a middle-aged vagrant was picked up on the streets of downtown Saginaw. He claimed to an astronaut; one of the Ares III crew. Naturally, no one believed him. Not with the full crew on Mars, broadcasting live from the Argyre Basin. So, he ended up in the psychiatric wing of the local charity hospital, medicated and ignored, except for some missionary-types."

"Saginaw…? _Pete?"_ Linda whispered, allowing herself a bit of joy, amid apprehension. "But, if he's been back for two months, why didn't he call to warn us?"

"He tried, and so did the Bible-bangers." Gene rubbed at the back of his own neck, blue eyes fixed on the linoleum floor. "But, somehow, _every time,_ something went wrong. The connection was lost, power lines went down, someone wheeled him off for more testing… and, on top of all that, his ID chip burned out. Net result, no communication. Untilan hourago, that is."

"Huh," Roger grunted, shaking his head. "Like the universe wasn't going to let him get through in time to change anything."

"Exactly," Gene agreed, cracking his swollen knuckles. "He was safe, but unable to make contact until after _Endurance _vanished from our screens. Long story short: he's on his way, courtesy of Sawyer Air Force Base."

The mission director paused, then. He had further news, but there wasn't any good way to begin.

"And, John?" Dr. Kim prodded gently, when the silence stretched beyond bearing. "Has he, also, been hospitalized?"

"Umm… no. I suggest you sit down. This isn't going to be easy. I haven't called the family, yet, because, in a very real sense, you _are_ his closest kin, and I thought you deserved to know, first."

Linda saw Porter's mouth moving, saw that his collar was loosened, his 'Imperial Storm Trooper' tie askew. Every once in awhile, she made out a word or two.

"…ship…remains… identified… John Tracy's… very sorry."

There was more, but a wall of blurry brightness had sprung up, suddenly. Her eyes stung, colors and computer lights running together. Her insides were numbed by a killing frost. All at once, Linda sat down.

The chaplain started forward, but Roger Thorpe blocked his passage with an aggressive stiff-arm. This was a family matter.

Kim Cho embraced her friend, saying,

"It makes no sense, though! Why would the rest of us be transported safely… even the _rat…_ yet, not John?"

For, after reappearing in the musty halls of her Manhattan High School, Cho had caught the briefest glimpse of white fur and pink tail as Lucky vanished down a dark stairwell. At the time, it hadn't mattered much. After all, what was one rodent more, in New York City? She'd told the examining technicians, though. Linda now lifted her head.

"Fish, too," the doctor muttered. "Thing One and Thing Two showed up in Dan's bait tank, with the shiners and baby cats. We had to rescue them. I almost forgot."

It was hard to think around a wound so ragged and sudden. In this business, you lost comrades. Some to plane crashes and training accidents, others to sheer bad luck. Still…

"Kim's right," Roger decided. "It _doesn't _make sense. Every other living thing aboard _Endurance _made it off. Why not John? I mean…"

The Marine was thinking furiously, now, arguing with a universe whose rules he had yet to figure out.

"…Pete's transported two months into the past, and prevented from reaching NASA, or the press. Well, what if John's in the same boat?"

Cho picked up the thread, drawing certainty from her fiancé.

"Perhaps all of us were destroyed, and remade, Gene. All of our remains somewhere aboard. John was alone on the flight deck, the rest of us asleep… and the ship has yet to be fully explored. I beg that we not assume the worst, Gene, before checking each possibility."

The mission director rubbed his hands together, wanting very badly to be convinced. _(Once everything else had flown out of the box, all that remained was hope)._

"Maybe…" Gene slowly agreed. "He could… I don't know… be in prison for jay-walking, or a mental ward, somewhere. But why wouldn't he call in by now? Pete did."

It was Linda who answered that one. Patting Kim Cho's hand, where it had rested upon her shoulder, the doctor stood up again.

"Think about his psych-profile, Gene. He's never liked asking for help, or pulling others into his problems, either. If John found himself alone and in trouble, the _last _thing he'd do is call out the cavalry. You nearly scrubbed him for that, remember?"

Gene Porter had the requisite imagination to make that leap, and so, as it turned out, did NASA's director.

"Mr. Frasier," said Gene, "if you can give us twelve hours before going public with this, or telling the family… have the PR crew come up with some kind of stall tactic… we'll do our damndest to find Tracy, Sir."

The director agreed with a curt nod.

"You've got your twelve hours, Gene. I'll call Jeff, and stop up any media leaks. Best I can do, I'm afraid."

Then, glancing at the chaplain, who'd stood patiently by,

"Father Hughes, if you'll come with me? People are distracted by all the storm coverage and transferred citizens, anyhow, so all we really need to do is keep 'em looking the other way."

The two men left, plotting diversionary tactics. But it was Gene who rolled the winning numbers. Looking at the astronauts, he said,

"Wait a minute; doesn't John spend a lot of time on the internet? Is there a handle or code he'd respond to?"

_Curacao-_

About the time that Thunderbird 2 finally lifted off for Venezuela, groaning with refugees, Gordon made a swift, desperate move. Cold and fierce, a sudden upwelling had batted the sub off course.

Instead of trying to correct, he cut downward, praying that the dolphins could wring a bit more 'go' out of the little oxygen remaining in their lungs. More than once, he'd been in the same position, straining blindly for the pool wall with nothing left but a chest full of fire.

Something rocketed past, having aimed its strike where Thunderbird 4 _would _have been, had Gordon tried for the cave mouth, again. Its incredible speed and huge size… 80 feet long, he'd have wagered… shook the Waterbird and her escorts like dice in a cup. There was a gaping snout lined with jagged teeth, some broken, others with bits of twisted metal and flesh caught between. Then an eye, glowing yellow and slit-pupiled, as big around as a platter.

For just an instant, the eye seemed to look at him, swiveling slightly, pupil changing size to accommodate the red cockpit lighting. He caught a quick glimpse of his own reflection. Then, it was gone, followed by 70 feet of close-scaled muscle and sculling tail. Thunderbird 4 tumbled through black water, pierced by the dolphins' shrill clicking. One of them was injured, dorsal fin torn by a glancing blow.

Above, silhouetted briefly against wave-roiled surface and lightning flash, something enormous curved back around for another go. Fighting the urge to be sick, Gordon wrestled Thunderbird 4 upright again. He'd got another notion.

Besides sign language, the Sea Base dolphins understood Morse code (if speeded up to hornet level). As the monster shot downward, jaws wide, he coded and sent a single instruction: _break._

The cetaceans obeyed, flashing away in all directions, one of them leaving a blood-trail. To draw attention, Gordon cut on 4's running lights. Then, he extended the cutting arm, with its plasma torch. It ignited, a sun-bright, screaming-white flare.

The ocean bottom stood revealed, stark as a canyoned desert at mid-day. Above him, the killer veered off, confused. And, for the first time, Gordon saw the _other_ one. Definitely smaller, it hung back just a bit. A juvenile, perhaps?

In any case, he couldn't let them escape. Not with the dolphins fleeing for safety, and trapped refugee ships needing a way to the surface.

So, murmuring a swift, 'Hail Mary' (the hour of his death had never seemed closer), the young aquanaut triggered Thunderbird 4's force field and tore through boiling water like a comet, aiming squarely at the largest creature. He was frictionless and faster than sound, trailing shock waves that crushed a nearby reef and cracked another city dome.

The monster above him attempted to twist away, but too slowly. Its scales glittered in the torch light, polished bronze eaten through with corrosion. He struck it mid-flank, with a concussion that would have quite destroyed the little sub, had the force field not held her together. His plasma cutter sheared scale and flesh and muscle like a laser scalpel.

There was a brief, searing flash and a tremendous thud, as though he'd fetched up against a sodden cliff. At hypersonic speed, though, the shielded sub didn't stop. It _drilled._ Seconds later he was through, and two halves of an ancient reptile went spiraling down to the sea floor, trailing plumes of dark blood.

The smaller creature fled away, but Gordon dared not follow. Not yet. Using force shield and plasma torch at full speed had savagely drained his Bird. There'd be damned little power left to clear the docking platform.

Thunderbird 4 shot free of the stained depths, arcing back around toward the Sea Base. Gordon switched off the force shield and plasma torch. Then, shuddering slightly at the feel and 'scent' of blood in the water, he reached for a sickness bag. Not that he had much to heave… couple of strawberry power bars and a bottle of water… but he felt better, afterward. Weak stomach in times of crisis, or something of the sort. A good job Alan wasn't there; he'd have laughed. But Gordon had other matters to attend to. Calls, for one.

As soon as the shield's interference was gone, he picked up Commander Carlin's insistent, cross-frequency hail.

_"…base to Thunderbird 4. What the hell's going on, eh? Sounds like Armageddon out there! Do you require assistance?"_

He'd donned his suit gloves again, the better to remain firmly in his own body, and back in the cockpit. Flipping comm channels, Gordon replied,

"Sea Base Alpha, from Thunderbird 4. No assistance required, thank you, commander. There were two of your 'things' out here, actually. One's dead, th' other driven off. I'll be clearin' th' platform, now."

His voice sounded a bit strained. It actually cracked once, as it hadn't done in years. Carlin paused a moment, evidently speaking off-mike. Then he responded.

"Understand _two_ creatures? One dead, the other gone? That correct, Thunderbird 4?"

"Yes, Sir."

He was quite close, could see the wide, circular docking platform, its hatch blocked by the collapse of a mooring tower. Coral Sea was ¾ dark now, the water rising fast and chill within her. Streams of bubbles fled upward like jellyfish, escaping to the surface as the people could not.

"Very good, Thunderbird 4, and thanks for your help. I'm scrambling the last wave of Tigersharks, and I've got word from the US Navy and WASP, that they've freed up a couple of subs."

Throttling back, Gordon used water jets to maneuver his Bird into position. Lot of junk to avoid… though not much of a current… He played the sub's flood lights over twisted metal, illuminating the scarred hatch. Fifteen minutes; ten if he hurried, and if all went well.

The dolphins came back after a good breath of air, grinning at him through the view screen. One of them picked a bit of wreckage off the platform and heaved it over the side. Apparently, he was going to have help. Gordon waved at them, feeling very much better, suddenly.

"Understood, Sir," he replied to Carlin. "And, y' might want t' get clear, your own self. You can lead just as well from a boat, I'm certain."

"Love to," the commander replied, wryly. (At this point, he was standing knee-deep in cold water along with several dozen scientists, Sky-Diver pilots and citizens. "…but there's the small matter of a jammed airlock. I'm in this for the duration, whatever happens. No one's playing _'Nearer, My God, to Thee'_ yet, though."

Gordon couldn't help smiling at the man's tone of voice, which was far drier than his circumstances.

"Right. Hang on, then. We'll have you lot free an' clear in no time at all."

_Space, Thunderbird 3, beyond Earth orbit-_

Bad news, indeed.

"She's been cut in half," TinTin had told them, "and the pieces are drifting apart, with survivors in each. If we do not hurry, Scott, we will not be able to rescue both groups of cosmonauts."

_Kuiper _lay at the extreme end of Thunderbird 3's scanning range; very difficult to probe, even with International Rescue technology. The narrow cockpit was quiet for an instant.

Then, Scott nodded, looking pale and weak, but composed.

"We'd better make it quick. There has to be something we can do without, to save power… Alan?"

_"Huh?"_ The youngest Tracy looked up from the cribbed diagrams he'd been puzzling over. So far, he'd pretty much stayed out of things, not wanting to step on his recently wakened brother's toes. Anyway, Scott and TinTin seemed to have the situation under control.

Flipping switches and consulting data screens, the fighter pilot said,

"Simulation 24-Delta: the meteor-strike and space walk scenario. You remember it?"

"Well, _yeah._ Only practiced it, like, a million times, Scott."

Although he sounded exasperated and bored, 24-D was actually one of Alan's favorite simulations. The views of Earth were spectacular. If, you know, you _liked_ that kind of thing.

"Good. Same basic scenario, then. We'll get you as close as we can, you'll use the thruster pack to cross over, then find and rescue the crew. Repeat procedure for the other half of the wreck. Got it?"

Alan rolled his eyes.

"Piece of cake, Dude. I haven't scored less than a 96 on that sim in _weeks."_

Scott Tracy found Alan's confidence more worrisome than comforting, however. Shifting around in the padded pilot's seat, violet-blue eyes hard as drills, he said,

"This isn't playtime, Alan. Understand, there are real lives, including your own, at stake here. Be _careful._ The more you think things through, the less you'll have to regret, later. Understood?"

"Sure," Alan agreed, nodding with what he imagined to be just the right amount of steely resolve.

TinTin shook her head, but then, girls always worried too much. Drove him crazy.

"No problem, Scott. Just point me in the right direction, stand back, and let the rescues begin. You'll be, like, astonished."

Or something. Scott sighed, more concerned than ever. He wasn't up to a spacewalk, though, and he knew it.

_'Just add to the list of victims, and leave the kids with no direction.'_

John would have been a safer bet for this sort of thing. Working together, he and Scott had rescued over thirty victims, the time that a runaway business shuttle, the _Rutan,_ had collided with an orbital hotel.

Oh, well… you played the hand you were dealt. He couldn't help wishing that Alan would quit spinning his chair from side to side like that, though. He _knew _his youngest brother could be very serious and professional on a rescue. Why Alan never wanted to display that side of himself around _him_, Scott had no idea. Even Gordon played dumb less often.

"Right, then. Go suit up. We arrive at the danger zone in two-and-a-quarter hours."

A little less, actually. With skill honed by years of flight time and simulation, Scott Tracy maneuvered Thunderbird 3 within fiveyards of _Kuiper's_ largest fragment, expertly matching speed and angular momentum.

The ship tumbled and sparked in eerie silence, sliced cleanly in half. The other piece, flashing like a strobe where her spinning hull caught the sun, was already almost a hundred yards away. Soon she'd be lost entirely, another bit of shining junk swallowed by the void.

When noisy pumps had evacuated airlock three, and the outer hatch slid open, Alan activated his suit's thruster pack. He wore it like a school book bag, only without, you know, _books._ The maneuvering system was beyond cool; it was joy-stick operated, like his videogame set-up, back home. Floating there, he felt like a housefly in an empty soda can, except that the opening showed burning-white stars and dense blackness, not someone's mouth. Lucky thing, too.

Alan had to squash a joyous whoop, when his helmet display turned green. At long last, time to go! Pressing his right-hand trigger, the boy surged through the open hatch and out into space. He wasn't tethered, though he certainly carried one. No sense dragging a line that could tangle on something, right? Instead, he depended on his own eyesight, GPS and good sense.

There wasn't much to look at but wheeling stars, at first. Then a needle-shaped derelict hove into view. _Kuiper,_ or most of her.

The light in space was like nowhere else; absolutely pure, and diamond hard. Shadows were wicked sharp, cast by sun and Earth-shine, both. The heavens seemed to revolve around him, as Alan spun weightlessly right along with _Kuiper _and Thunderbird 3.

He could hear himself breathing inside the helmet; hear the hiss and click of all the little mechanisms that were keeping him alive, out here.

He thought of John, wondering if his astronaut older brother got as big a charge out of all this as _he _did.

_Nah…_ 'Jack Frost' had to have a good beer-buzz just to crack a smile, much less enjoy himself on the Mars mission… which he'd run into some trouble on, supposedly. But Alan didn't want to think about that.

Instead, with feather light taps to trigger and joy stick, he crossed from Thunderbird 3 (blazing scarlet behind him, with the Earth just peeping over her hull) to _Kuiper's _torn midsection. Easier to get in, that way.

Wires spat and sparked. Undulating globs of amber fluid showered away from slashed lines. He drifted into an open cabin, avoiding most of the floating junk. From the look of things, he was in the crew living area. At least, he thought he recalled something like that from the diagrams.

There was a shoe… a package of raisins, or something… and a photograph. Alan fielded that one, angling it with big, padded gloves so that light caught the image. For a long, quiet moment, Alan found himself peering through helmet glass at a snapshot of four people. A man, a woman and two boys; they were standing in front of some snowy mountains, looking kind of shy.

…and someone here, in this section or the one drifting slowly away, belonged to them. All at once, Alan's mood changed. Stuffing the picture in one of his belt compartments, the boy got back to business.

He triggered more little bursts of air, moving carefully around some bobbing exercise equipment and a mattress. The thruster-pack had a limited supply of compressed air, so he had to make each zig and zag count. Not so easy, in a zero-gee environment.

Where the sunlight penetrated, the compartment was brighter than noonday in southern California, and navigation was a matter of choosing his next safe handhold. Then, Alan came to the dark part. No sunlight, no nothing. Not even the ship's emergency lamps were on; just a few status lights blinking helplessly away to no-one.

Alan switched on his helmet beam, illuminating a narrow swathe of empty cabin.

_"You in yet?" _Scott's voice in his helmet, sudden and sharp, nearly made Alan soil his shorts. _"Alan? Report your progress, please. Radiation's playing hell with the scanners. They keep blinking out."_

"Wha…? Oh, yeah. Sorry, Scott. I'm in the living area, I think, approaching one of the hatches. It's a mess in here, for real. Kinda hard to see, too."

At the far end of the truncated cabin lay a hatch. Closed and sealed, it had probably saved the crew's lives. Scott resumed talking, his voice sounding so whisper-close that Alan wanted to shove him aside.

_"Okay. According to TinTin, we've got four victims on the flight deck, two more compartments away. She's got some kind of miracle touch with this equipment… shereads it to saythe crew's showing very little activity. They're not going to be much help, Al."_

"Umm…" there was a problem with that. Alan had assumed that the victims would be alert and cooperative, needing only a rescue ship to pick them up.

"Are they even wearing space suits, guys?"

There followed a pause, which to Alan Tracy felt interminable as an ice age. Then,

_"Most likely. Again, without direct communication, and with so much equipment jammed in around the cosmonauts, it's hard to be sure. They're up front, though. Just open the hatch, then shut it behind you before opening the next. Just like the simulator, Alan. And remember to brace. Decompression 'll blast you back out of the ship, otherwise."_

Sure. No problem.

Bobbing slightly in the grip of emptiness and dark, Alan reached for the hatch-side control panel. The status light was amber. Meaning…? Not much air? No solicitors? Missing half the ship? Another thought occurred, then; a terrible one. He drew his hand back.

"Scott…?"

_"Go ahead, Alan."_

Time was so short. The other piece of _Kuiper _tumbled further away with every second. By contrast, her forward section had slowed, tugged inward by Thunderbird 3's very slight gravitational pull.

"It's just… what if the other hatch _isn't closed?_ What if I open the door, and all the air comes out, and no-one's wearing a space suit, and they all die?"

There was a definite tinge of hysteria to the teenager's voice. In the cockpit of Thunderbird 3, both rescuers hunched closer to their instrument panels, deeply worried. TinTin decided to try something.

Lowering her clumsy barriers, the girl reached out for Alan's mind, meaning to calm him. But he was over fifty feet away, and moving that far past her own body was confusing.

Suddenly, there were no apparent limits to her senses. She could see-hear-feel-touch-penetrate throughout an explosively growing sphere.

_Warmth… plastic… metal… cloth… Scott… fluid… dead-cold… ship… Alan… smoke… people_

It went on, TinTin nearly losing herself in vertigo and freezing blackness. She had to pull back, find the tiny, fetal thing at the center of all this painful awareness, before she vanished utterly.

With a little cry, TinTin collapsed to the deck. Confused, Scott levered himself out of the pilot's seat and limped to her side. Helping the woozy girl to her feet, he guided her back to the tech console.

"TinTin, are you all right?" He had no idea what she'd tried, for the girl had kept her growing power hidden from everyone but Gordon. All Scott saw was an unexplained fainting spell.

Matters quickly grew even harrier. An alarm sounded. Alan's heart was racing, his breath coming harder. He was beginning to panic, learning that there was a jaw-dropping gulf between simulation and reality, high scores and lives. Scott hit his wrist comm, awkwardly patting TinTin's back at the same time.

"Alan! Al, can you hear me? _Calm down._ Deep breaths… that's better. Listen, there's a situation aboard ship I've got to deal with, but it won't take a minute. In the meantime: _stick to the script!_ Open hatch, go through, close hatch, over to the next, open that one, then tether and retrieve the victims. Got it?"

Feeling scared, and very lost, Alan nodded. He swallowed hard before managing a weak smile.

"Yeah… sorry. M' okay, Scott."

Like the ocean rescues all over again, only worse, because this one was on him. If he opened the hatch, and people were sucked out to die, it would be _his fault; _his finger that had pressed the button. But… he couldn't just float there, doing nothing. Reaching for the hatch-override switch, Alan changed comm channels.

"Hey… Gordon?"

It was a few moments before his brother responded. Earth was quite far away, peeping in and out through the torn end, as _Kuiper _whirled through space.

"_Thunderbird 4. Fire away, Alan."_

Alan had initiated the manual hatch-open sequence. A matter of punching in a five-digit access code provided by Brains. The square, silvery keys were small, his gloved fingers big and stiff.

Like the simulator. Nothing he couldn't handle…

"Just wondering what you're up to down there, Bro," he said aloud, very glad for something else to focus on. More minutes passed, slow as a hung jury.

"_Thanks f'r the ring,"_ Gordon came back at last, sounding normal, if kind of busy. _"Nothin' much on this end but a bit of house cleanin', I'm afraid. Yourself?"_

The hatch status light changed from amber to red. Sensing hard vacuum on Alan's side, the door's little computer wanted the compartment sealed. Again, Alan punched in the override command. (Knocked, too, just in case.)

"Wishing for a locksmith! _Man_, this is tough! Couldn't get you to, like, toss me your Swiss Army knife, could I?"

"_Brilliant notion. At this point, I'd barter a lorry piled with knives f'r a damn weldin' torch, and feel I'd got a bargain!"_

The door stopped arguing with him, switched back to amber, and began its countdown.

"That bad, huh?" And then, because the hatch was about to open, and he had to keep talking, he added, "When this is over, Gordon, you feel like, y' know… going to Tahiti again, to catch some surf, or something?"

Alan braced himself, seizing hold of a bulkhead strap. Just in time, just before the hatch opened, his brother replied.

"_Good thought. I'm well up f'r it, after all this. Might have t' bring a lass, though."_

A slim crack appeared between hatch and frame. Wind like an ax blade sliced through the narrow opening, smashing Alan against the bulkhead. He shielded his face plate with an upraised arm, battered by wind and debris.

As the hatch yawned wider, more air rushed forth, carrying with it a blizzard of manuals and equipment. There was sound again, too; the air first roaring, then grumbling, then dropping to a faint, regretful sigh before absolute silence clamped down.

Shaken, Alan peeked into the next compartment. No cosmonauts. Scott had said they were up front… Gaining confidence, Alan propelled himself through the hatch with a flick of his wrist, maintaining his grip on the metal door frame.

"Works for me," he told Gordon, meaning the tag-along. "Got yourself a new girlfriend, I take it?"

As Scott had instructed, Alan shut the door behind him, then played his helmet lamp around the new compartment. It looked like a washer on spin dry, full of ricocheting junk. No noise, though, even when something really big hit the bulkhead.

Lining up with the far hatch, Alan counted to three, then kicked away from his perch, tucking in as much as the pressure suit would allow. While he could push things out of his way, Alan, too, would be sent flying, in the wrong direction. Sort of 3-D billiards, with himself as the cue ball. _Pass._

"_More than a girlfriend," _his brother answered. _"That is t' say… she's everythin' I'd have put together, were Idesignin' a female, includin' all the bits I'd never have considered."_

"Awesome."

Drifting across the cabin, which seemed to be a laboratory, or work room of some sort, Alan narrowly avoided a careening refrigerator cabinet. The corner with the ESA decal almost hit him, but the young astronaut was able to squeeze himself down a little tighter and cannonball past it.

"So, does this uber-babe have a name? Or a twin sister, maybe?"

Now, for the other hatch. Scott checked in… some kind of TinTin problem, apparently. But, wasn't that just like a girl, to crack under pressure? No _wonder_ Gordon had lost interest.

"_Anika," _his brother came back, after cursing like a Royal Marine at a particularly obstinate slab of wreckage. _"…her name, that is. I'll have t' find out, about possible sisters. Isn't that against th' law, though? Two brothers marryin' a set of twins? The little ones'd be extremely related, wouldn't they? And awfully confused?"_

Alan grinned, punching in the second code as he tapped out another warning.

"Dude, that'd be _awesome!_ Our kids'd be double cousins, with three heads and stuff! You've gotta marry her, and I've _got _to get her sister. It's a lock, man. Keep Virge company, know what I mean?"

The second hatch opened up, and once again air shrieked past him, pelting Alan with detritus and cosmonauts. The first guy was barely conscious, flailing slightly in an effort to stop himself being swept away. Alan caught at him, holding fast until pressure in the two cabins equalized. There were three others on the flight deck, all in orange pressure suits and helmets. One was holding on to a seat strap, the other two bouncing around from bulkhead to instrument panel like a pair of pin balls. Alan managed to catch and halt them before their helmets cracked, or they broke their necks.

According to his suit's environment monitor, the atmosphere was poisoned with fumes and cooling smoke. An electrical fire, most likely. One they'd beaten out, but not before the canned air was irreparably fouled.

On top of all this, their comm system had shorted out. Fortunately, Alan had a slate and marker. Sometimes, it was the cheap little Wal-Mart stuff that saved your butt.

Using the slate, he gave his plan to those alert enough to care. All were agreed, so he tethered the cosmonauts together with a polymer line, putting the least responsive victims between the two conscious ones. At the very end was the mission commander, Irina Porizkova. As 'Tail-end Charlie', it was her job to shepherd her crewmates around dangerous obstacles. Alan would provide the motive power.

He was about to set off, when Scott's voice erupted in his helmet, again.

"_Alan, what's the hold up? We've got…"_

"Scott, _chill, _okay? We're going as fast as we can, out here. Two of these guys are, like, hyperbaric or whatever."

"_Hypoxic. FAB, Alan. Just, hurry. The tail section will be out of range in less than thirty minutes. Out of range if we want to make it home, that is."_

…But, hey; no pressure.

"Okay. I got it! Time's a-wasting, etc."

Scott chose not to answer. Helping TinTin back to her seat and then calling Alan had triggered a series of spasms. It hurt like hell, and he didn't quite trust his voice in the midst of one.

The girl, sensing how badly things were about to go wrong, decided to try another tack. She took a deep breath, only a little shaky, and clutched at the arms of her seat. Then, keeping herself focused, tight as a beam of light, TinTin put forth her mind. This time, she reached for _Kuiper's_ wildly tumbling rear section.

Odd thing, though… her mind had as much trouble slowing the massive vehicle as her hands would have. She felt like a ghost trying to halt a runaway dump-truck. While she could penetrate the thing… _feel_ it… affecting its state of motion was another matter, entirely. It rumbled right through her foggy grasp.

Biting her lip, TinTin focused tighter. There were two people trapped within, their air contaminated and thin. She could sense the dying-coal glimmer of their thoughts. TinTin tightened her grasp still further, trying desperately to slow the craft's doomed flight.

"TinTin…?" Someone seemed to be calling her from the bottom of a very deep well, at a time when she couldn't afford distractions. She felt her grip slipping. _Hull, rivets, wiring, engines, people_… too much to hold on to. Too big.

"Scott, s'il te plait… je ne…"

Like Sisyphus in Hades, TinTin was struggling with a boulder, and she couldn't hold on.


	10. Chapter 10: Trouble

Trying to do a better job of editing, this time, to eliminate those pesky run-together words... Happy New Year!

10

_Tracy Island, headed for the roundhouse-_

He'd at last gotten a second generator online, providing the house with a bit of here-and-there, will-o'-the wisp illumination. Most of the robots and cleaning mechs were down, though, and all but emergency comm disabled. Outside, the storm grumbled and snarled like a diesel truck in reverse.

After viewing the boys' computer-trap scenario, and taking copious notes, Brains (alias Dr. Hackenbacker) decided to speak to Jeff Tracy. He was halfway to the auxiliary office when his young son called, needing permission to leave campus. Hackenbacker gave it, but not without a frozen lump of misgivings.

One thing arguing for the boys' purpose was this: Fermat, Sam and Daniel must be given a chance fix what they'd done… And Brains, too, for that matter. Hackenbacker was well aware, as he stalked along the carpeted hallway (hands clasped at his back, white lab coat flapping in the breeze of his rapid passage), that he bore an equal share of the blame for all this.

A complicated situation, shot through with randomness and non-trivial knotting. At the heart of it all was a young man who'd designed and built a mighty computer, and what had come to pass because he did so.

_Changes…_

For some reason, Hackenbacker's thoughts turned back to his son. The boy had been… a surprise.

Being an orphan himself, Brains hadn't received love as well and early as most of his colleagues. But then, when it finally happened… when he realized that the thin, quiet girl who sat beside him in fluid dynamics and computer drafting shared every bit of his joy in science and math… he was overwhelmed.

Her parents had called her after a star of golden-age films. Myrna Loy Wells was her name. She'd had brown hair and blue eyes, and she talked too fast, head down, but always smiling. She'd shared her lunches with him and, more importantly, her ideas.

Against advice, young as he was, he'd married her. After all, how often do you get a chance like that? How often do you see, and recognize, and take to yourself genuine love?

She'd worn a borrowed dress and carried a hand-picked bouquet into Princeton's chapel. He still remembered.

He'd have built castles for her, if he could have. Instead, they'd moved into married student housing, laughing over their 'found object' décor and ramen noodle dinners. It's not what you eat, after all, but who's sitting across the paper-strewn card table from you, shaking salt on the powdered eggs.

They'd worked cross-word puzzles and sudokus together, gotten jobs and gone to class. He'd stayed up late most nights, working on his book.

_The stupid book._

She hadn't wanted to tell him about the coming baby. She'd worried that he'd be upset. Against advice, young and poor as they were, they'd decided to have the child, and to keep it.

_Thank God._

Accidents happen, they'd told him. Roads ice over, people drink too much on holidays and cross that yellow line… and innocents are killed. Good, intelligent, wonderful young wives, loving mothers…

_Rest in peace._

If it hadn't been for the boy, he'd have ended himself and joined her. If it hadn't been for the book, he'd have been driving, that night. They'd have been together.

But she was gone, and the hole could never be filled. He could never turn to her again with a theory or a puzzle, or another surprising example of the golden ratio. Never watch her make faces as she changed the baby.

But, there was Kurt, still; their little boy. All that remained of passion and joy and partnership. Of Myrna Loy Wells-Bremmerman, whom time would not return, and death hadn't spared.

Sometimes he took refuge in work, sometimes in talking to a good friend, but mostly, he thought about his son.

Now the engineer intended to join Fermat's expedition to Princeton, to protect the boy, and to guide him. First, though, he had to face Mr. Tracy. He had to tell a worried father what had happened to his missing son.

He entered the auxiliary control office after a polite knock, found Jeff sitting at the desk in his big leather chair, slamming down a telephone hand-set.

The elder Tracy seemed perplexed and exhausted. His iron-grey hair was mussed, his brown eyes deeply circled. He'd worn the same blue shirt for the last two days, having subsisted on coffee and cat-naps. Gennine Rivers stood at Jeff's side, one brightly-ringed hand on his shoulder. She had her blonde hair clipped back in a limp ponytail, and she wore a pale pink dress.

Said Jeff, his voice hoarse and harried,

"Why the hell won't they tell me what's going on? All I got from Frasier was the same 'wait and see', 'too early to tell' nonsense that Guthrie tried feeding me. _Guthrie!_ We flew six missions together, dammit! The least Saul could do is tell me the _truth!"_

Gennine rubbed timidly at his shoulders with her good hand. So much lay between them, and so much of it painful, that she had to relearn these little shows of tenderness.

Jeff crushed a throbbing headache with the fingers of one hand. Spotting Brains he said,

"Good news?"

Hackenbacker's blue eyes dropped to the beautifully patterned carpet, which had once graced the Shah's winter palace. A gift.

"P- Possibly, Mr. Tracy. It, ah… it depends on y- your perspective. M- May I speak with, ah… with you in p- private, Sir?"

Jeff stirred in his creaking seat. Cracked ribs made it difficult to find a comfortable position, despite all the aspirin and strapping. He hadn't been entirely honest with Scott, about his condition.

"Anything you have to say, Brains, can be detailed in front of my wi… my ex-w… _Damn it!"_

He turned too fast, hurting himself, then recovered enough to give Gennine a sharp look.

"Marry me?" Jeff demanded, as though closing a stock transfer. Her jaw dropped. One hand flew upward to clutch at the base of her white throat.

"But… Jeff, I don't know… I have all these… _things._ I…"

Brains uttered a quiet cough. He _really _needed to get on with this, to get to his boy.

Jeff gave him a swift nod, then pointed at the possibly 'once and future wife', snapping,

"Think it over. Get back to me in twenty. Brains, you're on. Go."

Hackenbacker found it difficult to concentrate after all that, but he had to explain himself, so…

"M- Mr. Tracy, I th- think I may, ah… may be able to, ah… t- to clarify what's h- happened with the m- mission."

Jeff stilled, suddenly. Without taking his eyes from Hackenbacker's face, he reached up and over to seize Gennine's hand.

"Go on." His voice was brittle-dry; a mere whisper.

Brains took a very deep breath. Thin ice, treacherous waters…

"As y- you've learned, Sir, th- the, ah… the Ares III crew encountered s- something on Mars that, ah… that attempted to, ah… to take control of the _computer._"

He paused momentarily, gauging Jeff's reaction. Five was a sore subject with Mr. Tracy, who'd long worried that an artificial intelligence of such power might someday turn on them. This part, the engineer knew, would be very tricky.

"T- To deal w- with, ah… with the p- problem, John asked F- Fermat to release m- my virus. Th- the one that was supposed to d- drop even a quantum c- computer in its, ah… its t- tracks. Y- You see that he, ah… he chose to f- fight, even at r- risk to his, ah… his 'child'."

Another pause. Very much, Brains did not wish to drive another wedge between father and son.

"I'm listening," Jeff Tracy replied, still clasping Gennine's hand. She was staring at the desk clock, her face curiously pale. Brains went on, saying,

"R- Right. Well, it, ah… it worked. S- Sort of. The virus apparently d- devastated the, ah… the attacker and c- computer, both. H- Here's where the chunks start f- flying. M- My son f-felt terrible about releasing the virus and, ah… and p- possibly driving John's computer into h- hiding. There is no d- doubt, Mr. Tracy, that Five possesses at, ah… at least rudimentary emotions, and is q- quite attached to John. She… I mean, _it_… c- could be dangerous, if, ah… if threatened. Or if _he_ is."

Jeff began to frown, his heavy dark brows drawing together.

"What are you saying, Brains? That all of this is the damn _computer's_ doing?"

"N- no, Mr. Tracy. I believe not. It would be, ah… be fairer t- to say th- that Five is m- more sinned against, than s- sinning. We j- jumped to our various conclusions and, ah… and forced her t- to act. All of us."

Hackenbacker stuck his hands in the pockets of his white lab coat, thought for a few moments, then went on. Curiously, the storm seemed to be letting up, just a bit. Moving off, perhaps?

"About th- the same time that, ah… that I tried opening a w- wormhole, th- thinking of deep space drive s- systems, Fermat c- came up with a plan to, ah… to c- catch Five, for reprogramming. H- he and his, ah… his friends d- devised a scenario, a p- program that should have been, ah… b- been convincing enough t- to lure Five into isolated st- storage.. trap the electron spin information and, ah… and f- freeze her. But th- that portion of the p- plan fell through."

Brains sighed, then forged onward. If only Fermat had _asked, _first…!

"The boys' scenario included th- the transfer of sh- ship and crew from Mars, c- collusion between, ah… between Pete McCord and the military, as well as p- people and creatures being, ah… being shifted through time and s- space, with a threat to John from, ah… from the H- Hood."

Jeff blinked. It was a lot to take in at one sitting. He focused on the last bit.

"The Hood? You mean the animal that tried holding Virgil for ransom in Macedonia? The same one who attacked us on San Marco and used Tin…"

Just in time, Jeff stopped himself. The girl had never been told what had happened that night. They just… didn't talk about it. Ever. TinTin was the most innocent among them, and deserved at least that much protection.

"Y- yes, Mr. Tracy. _That _Hood. Th- the scenario b- brings him back to life. N- not for long, f- fortunately. It sh- should have worked beautifully as, ah… as a catchment scheme, b- but we had an incredible ch- chain of bad, ah… bad luck."

Jeff rang for more coffee. He'd have liked something far stronger, but had a feeling he'd soon be needing all of his wits. Lowering the volume slightly on the chatter from Thunderbirds 2, 3 and 4, he said,

"Keep talking. How did this supposedly fool-proof plan go bad?"

"In a n- number of ways, Mr. Tracy. Fermat accidentally uploaded the p- programmed scenario after Daniel had, ah.. had performed a c- calculation of its probability."

Shoving at the lank brown hair which fell over his forehead, Brains added,

"Nothing in the universe is certain, Sir, until it is observed, and working the f- figures is the ultimate f- form of observation. Five picked up the program. I, ah… I opened the wormhole, providing power and threat, both. She ran the script, and all, ah… all h- hell broke loose. Quakes, st- storms, missing p- persons, downed planes, and displaced c- creatures."

"That sea monster?" Jeff inquired, glancing at the desk-top comm from which Thunderbird 4's progress was continually monitored.

"Among others, Mr. Tracy, y- yes. I very m- much doubt that an overgrown T- Tylosaurus is the w- worst thing we're g- going to, ah… to see tonight."

Jeff drummed his fingers. Alan seemed to be faltering a little, up in Kuiper. Their father sent Scott a brief message, advising him to remain in constant contact with his younger brother. Nine times out of ten, you could talk someone out a panic attack.

"Bottom line?"

Brains shifted position, folded his arms, then unfolded them.

"Th- the bottom line is, Sir, that the astronauts have been transferred. Three, according to Sam Nakamura, have been f- found already, alive and, ah… and well."

Jeff surged from his chair as he'd done once before, when his son, stiff and apprehensive, first brought him the news…

"John's been found? He's safe?"

But Brains shook his head. As rain in languid silver sheets caressed the windows, he said,

"F- found, no. But w- we mustn't, ah… mustn't despair, Sir. The scenario _requires _John t- to be alive. F- Fermat believes him to b- be back at Princeton. My son and, ah… and his friends h- have gone with, ah… with a teacher, to find _yours."_

Jeff Tracy was quick-witted, a verydecisive man. He did not sit down again. Instead, he indicated the chair to Gennine. (Grandmother Tracy was napping in an antechamber, packed and ready to move still higher, if the water kept rising.)

As Kyrano had by now bowed his way into the office with a tray of Turkish coffees (brewed over a little spirit lamp, just like the old days), Jeff took one of the cups and said,

"Let's go, then. I know you'll want to help Fermat redeem himself, and I won't let you face the Hood alone. He's proven himself extremely dangerous."

Brains acquiesced with a brief nod, despite the fact that everything they'd done so far only seemed to make matters worse.

"Th- thank you, Mr. Tracy. Your, ah… your help would be very w- welcome. We c- can get there fastest in, ah… in Thunderbird 6."

Very glad to be seeing action, Jeff next turned to Kyrano. The loyal old manservant, elegant and quiet as ever, bowed low.

"Mr. Tracy?" he inquired softly, his voice a smoky mélange of French, Malay and Polynesian accents.

Jeff clapped a hand to Kyrano's shoulder, snagging ragged fingernails on sheer silk.

"Kyrano, I'm relying on you to assist _both_ Mrs. Tracys in holding down the fort. Keep the boys moving in the right direction, old friend."

Again, Kyrano bowed. Were his eyes a bit yellow? If so, Jeff failed to notice, nor Brains, either.

"It shall be as you say… friend."


	11. Chapter 11: Lies

Nearly there, honest. (Had to edit... sorry!)

11

_Princeton University, Holder Hall, a somewhat redesigned dorm room-_

John adjusted a few things. A connection here, a chipset there, before sitting back to examine his treasured handiwork. The most visible portion of it, anyway.

In truth, the computer took up most of the space in his own dorm room, a fair chunk of the connecting lavatory, and all of the room next door (he'd hacked a few former student files to rent that one, too. Quieter, that way, and he really _did_ need the space).

Even with miniaturization and modern technology, as Ken Flowers would have put it: _this sucker was huge._ Ate power like crazy, too, but that wasn't a problem, really. He'd shuffled things around to where Tracy Aerospace wound up paying the bills. Didn't suppose his father would ever notice what amounted to missing pocket change… and didn't much care, either.

_Whatever._ He was stalling, and he knew it. Outside, beyond the drawn shades, it was snowing. Big, clumpy flakes; the kind that would stick. Inside, John Tracy had to pull together whatever passed for his courage, and turn this thing on.

He leaned back in his work station chair, and heaved a quiet sigh. On the student desk before him sat the flat monitor screen, and a row of linked boxes. Five out of eighty-seven, in all, only a few of which were at all conventional.

He'd come here to learn, for a very specific reason. Not for grades, or degrees, or friends. Not even Drew. Though… he'd chosen to remain on campus that Christmas, rather than going home. Not _for _her, exactly. Just… _around _her. Mostly.

As their encounters began to occur at a rate higher than statistical likelihood predicted, he'd upgraded Anarchick from 'associate' to 'friend'.

_(N + 4 incidents per day, N being equal to the number of classes they shared. That was his algorithm. Exceed that, and you weren't just randomly bumping into him… you were looking to.)_

What came after 'friend' he didn't feel ready for. Glum recollections of the damn medical encyclopedia, blushing health teachers and late fall on the ranch weren't exactly encouraging. The bulls and stallions seemed pretty enthusiastic… made a lot of noise, anyhow… but the females just sort of put up with them. If there was a lesson for John in all this, he wasn't sure what it was.

Ken hadn't had any answers, either. All he'd done, when questioned, was shrug, spit tobacco juice and hand John a beer.

Not that all this navel-gazing was solving anything. He had a serious question to answer, one that had torn him for the last four years.

John sat forward in his chair again, half listening to the soft hiss and splat of snow against the window, the droning hum of fish tank and refrigerator. People were calling out and stomping around in the hallways, but they barely registered. Not important.

Reaching out, John put a hand on the start button, the one that linked all the boxes with a pile of super-cooled components in the chipped bathtub.

_(Shouldn't _cause a blackout this time… hopefully.)

But he hesitated, still, staring into the monitor's impassively blank face. You couldn't fail, if you didn't try. But… he didn't really have a choice, did he? He _had_ to find out, and he couldn't do it alone. Oh, well. No time like the present…

He'd started to press the button, when Drew kicked the door open and walked on in, snow melting on her black hair, green mesh grocery bag in hand.

"Hey, loser," she greeted him, tossing her bag on one of the bunks. Dressed for the season, she had on a big black jersey with a skeletal and Santa-robed 'Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come' painted on the front. Very festive. Red lipstick, though, and only slightly smudged makeup. In a rare mood, apparently.

She crossed the dorm to his chair, resting both hands on its padded back, hard, so that she nearly toppled him. Again.

He hated it when she did that. No, wait… it was something she did with him that… he was pleased happened often enough to be irritated _by?_ But that didn't make any sense, either. Females, John Tracy decided, were inherently confusing. Nature of the beast.

"Well," Drew quipped, slapping at the side of his head, "I can tell from your cheery poker-face that you're glad to see me. Let's see… _'Hi there, Drew. How are you? How was the line at the W? Can I offer you something?' "_

Right. He got up, and she almost fell when his counterbalancing weight left the seat.

"Ow! Thanks, Tracy. 'Preciate it, really."

Then, rubbing at a scuff on her inked and self-scratched arms,

"Where are you going?"

"To the ice box," he explained, patiently. "You said you wanted a …"

_"No,"_ Drew shook her head. "I just wanted you to _ask_ me if I wanted anything. _Never mind_. If I'd known how hard you'd be to housebreak, Tracy, I never would have taken you in."

Okay, it was _his _room. Before he could point this out, however, she'd moved on. Examining the set-up on his study desk, Anarchick groused,

"You _still_ playing with this thing? Fish or cut bait, fella. All that processing power's nothing but a waste of time, otherwise."

Rather than stand irresolutely in front of the refrigerator cube, feeling like a guest in his own dorm, John returned to her side.

"Why's it so important, anyhow?" she persisted, needing to understand.

Tracy shook the pale hair out of his face; gave her a brief, searching glance. She'd have liked to kiss him… grab him by the shoulders and drop one right on him… but he was skittish as a stray kitten, and never picked up on her signals.

"I'm looking for someone," he told her.

"Try the white pages. It's quicker."

He shook his head, quite serious. But then, he nearly always was.

"I told you my mother fell, with the baby. Remember?"

Drew shot him a sarcastic look.

"Uh-_huh_. And…? But…? Therefore…? You were saying…?"

He ignored her insulting tone, responding to the words, instead.

_"And _father told us that she let go of the baby when she hit the snow. _But _that's a damn lie. _Therefore,_ I need to figure out what really happened."

Drew felt her eyebrows climbing.

"Annnd, you know all this… _how?"_

He considered a moment, seeming to arrive at some kind of major decision. Hard to tell, when he wouldn't look her quite in the eye.

"Okay: couple of years back, I was doing some fence work with Ken Flowers. You don't know him. 5-strand barbed wire, pine logs and pain-in-the-ass staples. The fence, not Ken. Right. So Grandma calls, because the Hardykid fell into a cistern collection hole, at the property line, about a mile and a half north of the access road. We had to help get him out.

"Scott, Rossand Ken went down into the cistern itself, using Kemminger's irrigation tunnel, and Virgil and Granddad dug a second shaft with the rock drill, right below the kid. I went through the shaft to get him, after the drill pulled out. I was sort of thin, back then."

Drew snorted, gave him another cuff that really wanted to be something else.

"Yeah. And you're such a butterball now, Tracy."

"I've gained," he replied with quiet dignity, "two and a half pounds. It's all the snacking."

_"Ohhh, _boy! Hold me back. Next stop, Weight Watchers."

He looked at her, more or less directly.

"Are you finished?"

Anarchick smiled, head cocked to one side.

"Yeah… for now. But, please," one hand at her chin, pose thoughtful and refined, "carry on, my good man."

"Not much more to tell. I went down the shaft after the kid. It was a tight fit. When I got to the end, I reached up and felt around. Got his legs. His mother was calling down the top of the other hole, to keep him awake. He jerked his legs when I grabbed his ankle, but his mom told him what was going on. Anyway, I got him worked out of the collection hole and into the drill-shaft, then started inching backward with him. You have to use your elbows and scrape with your feet, for that. Sort of uncomfortable. Anyway, about halfway along, the shaft partly collapsed."

He shrugged, went on with his story like he was discussing a Sophomore English project.

"It was dark for awhile, and hard to breathe, but Virgil and Granddad hauled us out. Thing is… He was just this neighbor kid. Nothing special, right? But I _didn't _let go."

Now, John's beautiful face became cold, his blue-violet eyes hard as flint.

"And _she _wouldn't have, either. I was stuck in that bore hole like a cork, no air, and the kid was squirming around kicking me, trying to get the dirt off his face, but I didn't let go. My mother would have hung on to Gordon till the end. No matter what. _That's _how come I know. Father said the baby wasn't found with her, and he's a liar."

And then, once more stoic and withdrawn,

"That's why I need a better computer. To help find my brother… That's all."

Not sure what to say, Drew acted, instead. She stepped forward. No playful cuffs, this time; no slaps or punches. She simply reached him in for a cautious hug. He smelled good. Close-your-eyes-and-bury-your-face kind of good. And he didn't pull away; just sort of reached around and stroked her hair.

There wasn't much trust in Autumn Drew's life, or much affection, either. The fact that Tracy had chosen to stay with her over Christmas, rather than shipping back to whatever big, square, cattle-intensive state he hailed from, both confused and touched her. He might not always know how to express it, but John Tracy was extremely loyal; a very good friend. And, she loved him for it.

"I hope you find him," she whispered softly, tip-toeing up for that kiss.

_Tracy Island-_

Victoria Tracy had arisen. Slowly, with many a querulous complaint and feeble, shaky step, the old woman hobbled away from her cot. Gennine stared. Was that a _stick_ Grandmother Tracy was leaning upon?

Kyrano gave the infirm old woman a single, contemptuous glance and then, directed from afar, moved away from the door. The men were gone, opportunity before him.

_'Do it,' _the voice urged, silky and cold; while pain like dirt-crusted talons drove into his aching skull. _'Strike now_. _Free us both… or, all three… you were meant to rule, Kyrano… not to serve… your daughter to bear kings!'_

The icy voice and acidic will twined on, snake-like and choking, limited only by distance.

_'Why do you feed the vapid sheep whose throats should be locked in your jaws? Strike now… destroy the females… then call to Thunderbirds 2 and 3, saying thus, and thus...'_

The instructions were clear in his head, hiss-whispered confidingly. Kyrano almost giggled aloud.

_'They are exhausted,'_ the voice insinuated. His brother's voice. How Kyrano had missed him…

'_They will trust you… follow your commands. Thunderbird 2 into the side of a mountain, Thunderbird 3 so deeply into space that she will never return. Then, Thunderbird 4… wrest control from the desk, and plunge it deep. Let it be crushed beneath dark water, while that within shrieks its last. Do it now…'_

What fun. Kyrano wriggled sensuously at the thought of all that pain and fear, at the thought of tasting another's death, then slipping free at the end. Free to strike again.

Young 'Mrs. Tracy' was closest, and the only _real _threat. The old woman he could pull apart at his leisure. Smiling, Kyrano reached for Gennine, who stepped away with a small, puzzled sound.

Entirely, he failed to notice when the shuffling stopped, the back straightened, and the stick (wielded like a baseball bat in the hands of a major league hitter) whistled through the air. The wooden walking stick struck Kyrano on the back of the head, so hard that he staggered, rubber-legged, still reaching for Gennine.

The younger woman screamed, but to her credit, she also up-ended the heavy brass coffee tray on him, dousing her would-be assailant with scalding hot fluid. Then she flung the tray, cracking Jeff's reeling manservant square on the forehead with it. This time, Kyrano collapsed, his strings cut.

Grandmother Tracy stumped forward, prodding at his twitching form with the stick.

"And _stay_ down, old man!" she snapped, giving him another vicious jab. "The nerve! As if I couldn't do no better than to stand there and watch!"

Gennine reached for the comm switch, but Victoria shook her head.

"No, Gennie-girl. The menfolks is busy, and we can handle this one our own selves. I don't trust this snake futher n' I can throw him, though, and we can't keep bustin' him on the head, neither. You run on downstairs and fetch up all the belts and pantyhose and stretch-cords you can find." Another gesture of the stick, as though shooing Gennine away.

"_Git, now! _Quick-like!"

Jeff's maybe-wife nodded hurriedly and started to bolt from the auxiliary control office. Then, changing her mind, she darted back. Leaning down, she kissed the old woman's cheek, then scurried off about her mission.

"_Huh,"_ Grandmother Tracy snorted. "Not like I'm a hero, or nuthin'. Just because you been around the sun a time or two, don't mean you can't stay ready! Them as forgets that is courtin' grief, is all I got to say."

_Space, Thunderbird 3; the cockpit-_

Confused and weakened as she was, the whisper found a way inside. Thin and faint, as from great distance and effort, it still compelled her.

_'You permit them to use you… to harness your power,' _it hissed, like air escaping a punctured space suit. _'You, who should be their mistress.'_

A vision came to her then, pale as an image reflected on smoke; five young men, kneeling at her feet, obedient and afraid. But TinTin recoiled, horrified.

"No!" She raged aloud, lashing at the ugly vision. "Get away!"

Scott was utterly baffled. He put a hand on the writhing girl, who seemed about to twist clear of her seat. Squatting down as well as he was able, Scott pulled TinTin into an awkward embrace, thinking to provide comfort. He couldn't know, of course.

_'Do it now, my daughter,' _the gloating voice hissed, urging her to ignite Thunderbird 3's main engines. _'Let those too weak to save themselves, perish.'_

Frantically, sickened by the filthy-cold hand which combed through her thoughts, the girl tried to rebuild her barriers.

"I'm not your daughter!" She howled, a storm of furious tears wetting her face and Scott's shoulder.

_'No? Then, dearest one, where is your mother? Why has Kyrano never spoken of her? The weak and cowardly wretch… powerless, pathetic…! Whom do you suppose possessed his mind, the night you were made, my princess?'_

_"NO!"_

Wildly, TinTin lashed out, smashing a doubled fist into Scott's barely-healed abdomen. He crashed to the deck, but the anguished girl didn't see him. Nor did she hear Alan's increasingly puzzled transmissions.

"Hey, Scott? TinTin…? You wanna open the airlock now? _Guys…?"_

He was trapped outside, between a gutted derelict and a stubbornly sealed hatch. The Earth was blue and beautiful above him, seeming just out of reach amid frozen-white stars.

"Scott? The airlock? These folks are _dying_ out here!"

No response but silence. The Earth glided coolly past him, disappearing behind Alan's string of fading cosmonauts, and _Kuiper._ Now the sun rose behind Thunderbird 3, fierce and hot.

Alan's faceplate darkened automatically. His pressure suit's cooling fans cut on. Captain Porizkova used her thruster pack to swoop forward. He couldn't see her countenance behind the golden sun-shielding, but she was reaching out for something. The marker and slate, maybe?

Alan pounded upon the hatch, the reaction nearly bouncing him off. Only his safety-clipped tether saved them all from a dark and endless drift.

The female cosmonaut was nearly beside him, now, dragging the others around in a slow half-circle. Distractedly, Alan fumbled the slate from its belt hook, meanwhile switching comm frequencies.

"Gordon?" He called, willing his voice not to shake.

_Curacao, the troubled waters around Sea Base Alpha-_

He'd made furious headway on the wreckage, mostly done, when something new appeared on Thunderbird 4's sonar screen. Not the…? No. Looked more like a sub, to judge by cruising speed and configuration. Engine and screw noise sounded vaguely familiar…

Quickly, Gordon thumbed over his mental list of submarine types, seeking a match. Didn't seem to be WASP… _There!_ American Barracuda class, bottom mapping 'research vessel'.

About to hail her, he was interrupted by a voice over the comm. The accent was mid-western, the tone briskly companionable.

"Thunderbird 4, this is US Navy submarine SSN 463, the _Requin, _Michael Parks commanding. I've been instructed by the Department of the Navy to place my vessel at your command, Sir… oh, and… Chief Alvarez says 'hello'."

_Chief _Alvarez? Gordon smiled. Regular up-and-comer, Davy Alvarez, and most welcome, besides. If only he'd heard that Murphy was aboard, his day would have been complete.

"_Requin_ from Thunderbird 4. Good t' see you lads, up-start Chiefs an' all. Not armed, I suppose?"

She _looked _like an innocent research vessel, but, knowing the United States Navy, as he did…

Another slash of plasma, and the last of the towergroaned free, trailing droplets of glowing metal as it twisted down and away. Meanwhile, the new submarine showed dark and sleek as a moray eel in the spattering-white torch light.

"Armed? Not _officially, _no. WorldGov frowns on that kind of thing, Thunderbird 4. Not to say that a few of the boys might not have packed along a 'fish' or two, for, say… _recreational_ purposes."

All he needed to know.

"No doubt," Gordon replied, cutting off the torch and moving away from the platform. Behind him, the first of the Tigersharks and rescue vessels made ready to dock. The dolphin pod rejoined him, zipping back from crag and surface. They were still vulnerable, though.

"Pity, really, as there's this rare and exotic creature sneakin' about somewhere, that it'd be a _terrible_ shame if somethin' permanent was to happen to."

After tracing his way through that wooly tangle of negative phrasing, Commander Parks responded,

"Got it, 4. Wildlife enthusiasts that we are, my crew and I might just do a little creature-watching. Like you say… be a real shame if something previously unknown to science went all belly-up messy on us."

"Man after my own heart," Gordon replied feelingly. _God_, he loved the US Navy. "Give 'junior' my best regards."

It was then, too far away and too late to act, that the young aquanaut received Alan's transmission.

_Returning from Caracas, Venezuela, Thunderbird 2-_

Virgil was desperately tired, anyway. Despite the jets of cold air blown upon the back of his neck, and all the 'nodding off' alarms, it was growing very difficult for the pilot to focus. It didn't take much, really, just a whispered suggestion or two, to keep him from seeing the altimeter.


	12. Chapter 12: Final Round

Hah! Told you I'd re-edit. Not exactly major stuff, but a word or two altered here and again, for clarity's sake.

12

_On the road, between New York State, and Princeton University; a wretched, rainy day-_

On the bright side, the storm seemed to be letting up. What had risen to the ferocity of a world-wide category 3 hurricane had begun to clear. Weirdly, in almost pixel- or wire frame-like bits of sky, light was now streaming through the purple-dark clouds.

Peering up past rhythmically swishing windshield wipers and sheets of sluicing rain, Fermat muttered,

"Sh- she must be… very dis- distracted. The… f- fractal bits are… starting t- to show."

For the 'cloud pattern' image was indeed becoming obvious, as though Five had ceased maintaining the storm.

"That's a good sign," Daniel responded bracingly. "I _think."_

As the red car, a partially restored 2005 Mustang, was battered around the Jersey Turnpike, Fermat turned in his seat. Although it made him rather sick to do so, the boy could squint past his patched leather headrest to the back, where Sam sat hunched over an open laptop. The younger boy's serious face was picked out in soft flickers of blue and green, brief glitters of white.

"Well?" Fermat asked him, trying not to barf, or sound impatient. Sam Nakamura tended to become testy under pressure; mostly because he was his own harshest critic, and anything you said to him would simply re-echo the Greek chorus of doom-sayers already resounding in his head.

Sam glanced up. To Fermat, he didn't look angry; just embarrassed.

"Nothing, yet, from computer or…" his forehead wrinkled thoughtfully, "…your friend is an astronaut, isn't he?"

Fermat actually had to think a moment, before replying.

"Yes… I m- mean… I know that John w- was engaged by… NASA in s- some… capacity."

Twisted round in his seat, arms wrapped tightly about the battered old headrest, Fermat suffered a moment of confusion.

"Th- that is to say… he's rather y- young, but I'm certain there's… a perfectly l- logical rationale f- for the… ap- pointment of a… teenaged astronaut."

Miss Wilde had been driving with the frantic, muttering concentration of someone attempting to push a rusty shopping cart across the Autobahn. As they approached exit 9, with its palisade of narrow toll booths, she snapped,

"Gentlemen, not to cut in… but I really could use all four sets of eyes and brains, right now."

Unbelievably, there was traffic. Military and emergency vehicles, as well as scores of intrepid New Yorkers and Canadians. (According to the radio, the storm in the far northern latitudes was the blizzard of the millennium. Entire towns had vanished beneath a blanket of frozen white.)

"Sorry, Miss Wilde," Daniel apologized, digging coins out of the ashtray for the toll booth. The inside of the car smelt a little like perfume, and a lot like chewing gum (Juicy Fruit). Handing the coins up to Fermat, Daniel Solomon smiled to himself. He'd had no idea that Miss Wilde chewed gum. The knowledge made him happy, like a secret shared between them.

After the toll booth gulped their rattling coins (window briefly lowered, fumes, wind and sideways rain swirling through the car), they turned onto Route 18. A convoy of dark green National Guard vehicles rumbled past.

Briefly, Fermat glimpsed the pale half-ovals of helmeted faces peering through the back of the truck. They didn't look very old, the Guardsmen…

Funny, how someone you passed in the halls of your school could be an upperclassman, a privileged senior student glowing with confidence, but put him in a uniform and pot helmet, and he looked like a worried kid.

_…Storm'd at with shot and shell,_

_Boldly they rode and well,_

_Into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of Hell,_

_Rode the six-hundred…_

"Good luck," Fermat whispered, as the last green truck accelerated away. They were headed for the coast.

He squirmed around in his seat again. The car wavered slightly as Miss Wilde swabbed a bit of red rag around her side of the windshield, arguing with condensation and weather. Sam was still busy, but Fermat needed to talk.

"H- hey," he said, "this… friend of y- yours, at Princeton…"

"Brother," Sam corrected, scarcely looking up. "My brother, Edwin, is a grad student in the plasma physics department."

Even Daniel stopped daydreaming long enough to blurt,

"You've got a brother?"

Their friend nodded.

"He's decent enough, for a college student. Terminally busy, though, and not much pleased to be disturbed, either. But, he says that he's asked around, and no one's seen John. He's going to wait until we get there to check out the underground. Safety in numbers, or something…"

"Brother…?" Fermat repeated incredulously. Alan and Gordon Tracy were the closest things he'd ever had to brothers. What it must feel like to have a _real_ brother, an actual flesh and blood sibling, he couldn't imagine.

_"Underground?" _Anne Wilde cut in, her narrowed grey eyes reflected in the rearview mirror.

"You never said a word about any _'underground'_, gentlemen. All we agreed to do was tour Princeton, looking for John. I promised your…"

"Oh, _no_, Miss Wilde," the boys dropped everything to reassure her, talking over one another in their best, most sincere-sounding tones,

"It's not at all dangerous. They only call it the underground because…"

"Because it's an old parking garage, but now the local people and tourists go there for all their shopping and entertainment needs."

_"Very_ s- safe," Fermat emphasized. "In… fact, M- Ma'am, you'll most likely b- be bored stiff. I recommend that… you drop us off w- with… Sam's brother, and…"

"No, _Sir._ We stay together, or we don't go at all. Period. End of stanza."

"Yes, Ma'am," Fermat gusted. _Grown-_ups…! They just never got the important stuff!

Later, Sam gave him a sharp look.

"This access code you've given me is utterly worthless, Fermat. No response, whatsoever. The protocols have been changed. Do you know any others?"

Fermat hesitated. Of course he knew. But they were International Rescue passwords, encrypted by John Tracy. If he gave them up now, the Thunderbirds' entire communications and data storage system would be open to Samuel Nakamura, one of the most gifted young hackers on the planet. _Terrific _idea. Not that Sam meant any harm, but he was insatiably curious, and couldn't keep his hands off the data. A war between him and John would be interesting, to say the least. Absolutely, the bytes would fly. So…

"No… I'm af- afraid that I… d-don't have anything… more current, Sam. We'll just have to… to l-look for him the old-fashioned… way. Foot it."

Sam said nothing further on the matter, but shut his laptop with an aggrieved snap. For something to say, and because he'd noticed it, being turned around and all, Fermat whispered,

"Is… th- that black car… f- following us?"

Sam, arms folded across his thin chest, almond eyes on the spotted roof-fabric, replied with a shrug.

"I wouldn't be surprised."

More 'sky-pixels' had cleared by the time they'd turned onto Harrison Street. About a quarter of the heavens were now blue and clear as a picture post card, the remainder still angrily squalling. The radio meteorologist was going nuts. Even Miss Wilde and the boys were distracted. One minute, you were watching sunlight spatter rainbows off the beading water drops; next you were caught in a Biblical downpour, complete with lightning, high winds and drumming rain… but only beneath the 'pixel'.

"Have to work on coding better realism," Daniel muttered aloud. "In case, you know, there's ever another giant, reality-warping power surge in need of a script."

They met Edwin Nakamura just outside massive Peyton Hall. The boys ran on in, waiting with Edwin in the glass-fronted foyer while Miss Wilde parked the car.

Sam's brother was slender, black-haired and rather stooped, with a pronounced tendency to interrupt. He dressed curiously, pairing a red flannel shirt with a loose, Princeton-crested tie, brown leather wing-tips and ragged jeans.

As Sam had indicated, he didn't look happy. Before his younger brother could mumble more than the… _'I can'_… portion of,

"I can explain,"

…Edwin had snapped,

"Sam, what were you _thinking?_ Mother doesn't need this right now. You _know _how hard things have been for her. Absolutely the last thing she needs, with terrorism, space and weather crises popping up everywhere, and China prepared to secede, is a lot of stupid kids on some foolish goose-chase."

"_Wild _goose chase," Anne Wilde corrected him, stepping in through the double doors in a burst of wind and hissing rain. Gesturing back the way she'd come with a vague wave, the teacher added,

"Do any of you noble young fellows claim among your circle of friends a couple of… well… body guards? Suits, dark glasses, shoulder holsters?"

Edwin sighed, hitching his tie even looser.

"Just pretend you don't see them," he told her, after stepping up to introduce himself. "Doesn't make them go _away,_ or anything, but it helps maintain this pitiful illusion of normalcy."

"I see," Miss Wilde replied primly, folding up her black umbrella. There was a stand in the corner, with a hand-written sign taped above it that read,

_'Please remember which umbrella you brought with you. If you brought an umbrella. If you remember to leave.'_

She added hers to the moth-eaten assemblage, some of which looked very old, indeed. Returning to Edwin Nakamura, and the conversation, she asked,

"And these 'friends' of yours are…?"

"Here to help, supposedly. _Mother's_ idea," Edwin told her. "Although, they mostly just get in the way, especially on dates. Come on, quickest access to the underground from here is through the basement. There's an old subway tunnel that'll take us right to it. And step lively, please; I've got a plasma-turbulence experiment cooking that just won't wait."

_An 'outside place', deeply linked to every mechanism on the planet-_

Touching the cyberlink had put him as far within as if was possible for a mere human to get. Direct interface to beautiful chaos. Streaming silver data and interconnecting sites, giant hubs and ethernet hotspots unfolded to an infinite horizon of glowing grey-black, filled with endlessly iterated grid lines. Movement and flow was everywhere, too swift to take in.

Even ramped-up with alertness tablets, the human mind was unable to grasp change on such a rapid, massive scale. If solid matter could glow, leaping, shifting and branching like black flame, it would create a universe like the one John now found himself in. Reminded him, briefly, of… but the thought faded, lost in a past that was crumbling further away with every moment.

There were older, well-established data paths, big as the Holland Tunnel. These flexed and pulsed, occasionally swelling as an arc of data flared in from a distant hub. There were shorter connections, as well; temporary communications that switched routes and IP addresses every few atto-seconds. A lot going on. Insanely busy.

Most of it, he ignored. He was in 'lurk mode' himself, invisible, unless he tried something foolish against one of the larger nodes. Which, of course, was _exactly_ what he'd had in mind. Navigating easily, hopping this data stream and that Unix shell, he arrived at the US government's titanic, leaky site. Vast and multi-tentacled, a throbbing black galaxy that jetted data as rapidly as it gobbled the stuff; it reminded John of a black hole spinning in silver-pale space. The wonder wasn't that .gov got penetrated… but that it managed to keep any secrets, at all. It was embarrassingly trivial to break into; hardly qualified as an exploit, he'd given himself so many back doors.

Distraction came, in the form of a familiar 'fingerprint'. As John looked deeper, focusing through myriad irrelevant files, he saw evidence of Five. Inactive, but there. Rooted in deep and ubiquitously as a weed. Sage brush, maybe.

He supposed that the feds would have called it an infection, but to John the spreadinglavendar web-work was most satisfying; proof that she was entrenched and well able to defend herself.

One thing, though… spotting a certain 'bug', he coded a patch on the fly, watched it mesh with her program like a silver bandage blending with neon flesh. Never again would Ike's virus work on Five. When she came online again, she'd be stronger. Call it a gift.

Satisfied, John pulled his attention away, lest his activity attract government countermeasures. Then, a query brushed through and beyond him, rippling the entire cyberscape. A loud ping. Someone was searching the web, asking for John Tracy.

Rather than reply, _or _continue infiltrating .gov, John chose to check International Rescue's private comm network. He'd designed it, with Hackenbacker's help. He knew all the tricks, codes, grips and systems. And…

"Oh, _shit,"_ in a cramped, darkened little room, his body whispered aloud.

_Okay. Prioritize._

_Thunderbird 2, less than fifty yards above the hungry ocean-_

The cockpit was warm and smoky, filled with small noises, vibration, annoying alarms… and one persistent voice.

"Virgil, wake up! This isn't a dream; you aren't home in bed, or out fishing. You're about to goddam crash. I can handle remote flight to the island, Virgil, but I need you to land 2. From my… angle… it's hard to judge fine distances."

"Huh…?"

Somehow, Virgil Tracy pulled himself partway free of exhaustion's black-velvet grip.

_"John…?"_

The pilot blinked and sat up, muscular body straining the seat straps as he stretched. The yoke and throttle were moving now, seized from without. Thunderbird 2's blunt nose lifted, and the view screen began to show patchy, cloud-spotted sky.

"You okay, kid? Where've you been? You got everyone half-crazy back home, worrying over your skinny butt."

_Kid…?_ But, he was… hadn't he been…? _Damn, _he hated it when Virgil pulled that 'big brother' crap.

"I'm as well as can be expected, under the circumstances. Busy saving _you_. ETA to Tracy Island approximately 30 minutes."

Virgil rubbed his brown eyes, squinted tiredly at the onboard GPS and chronometer.

"30 minutes, 15 seconds, you mean. From… _mark."_

Over the comm, the big pilot heard a gusty sigh.

"30:14:58. _Sorry_. Take a stretch break and grab some coffee, then return to the cockpit, Virgil. I can do the stick-work, but you're going to have to land her. TI's runway is too short to attempt a remote touchdown. Got it?"

Virgil nodded, smiling at his younger brother's impatient tone. Even as a baby, John had been cranky.

"Sure thing, kid. On my way."

As the dark-haired pilot unstrapped and lumbered heavily to his feet, John continued quietly,

"And… Virgil?"

"Yeah?" He was at the hatch now, ready to descend to the rear crew cabin, with its chromed head and coffee machine.

"When you see grandma, tell her… tell her I said not to worry. Okay?"

For some reason, the faint, static-ridden voice over the comm made Virgil dead serious, again.

"Yeah, John. I'll tell her. Give her a hug for you, too. But she'll like it better when you do it, your own self. Time to come home again, kid."

"I'm working on it," said the voice, very quietly.

_Thunderbird 4, off Curacao-_

If there was worse news, Gordon couldn't, at the moment, imagine it. His brother was trapped in space outside Thunderbird 3, with TinTin and Scott not responding. And Gordon was too far away to assist; bloody well _helpless._

Then he heard, unexpectedly, from John.

"Gordon, listen carefully. I want you to…"

_"John!"_ The young aquanaut lunged forward in his seat, stabbing the comm's visual button.

"Alan's got himself wedged, out in space. We've got t'…"

"I know." Calmly as ever, his middle brother cut him off. No picture had come up, for some reason, but even the ast… that is… the _astronaut candidate?_ Even his voice seemed an absolute promise that all would be tidied; everyone well.

"I'm on it, Gordon. Do you trust me?"

_"Yes…"_ A bit uncertainly, at this last, as it seemed to indicate that John wished him to sit on his hands and wait, or some such foolishness.

"Good. Then stop interrupting, and let me do my damn job. I'm working on the space situation. Meanwhile, I need you to cut off outside comm, as soon as I sign off, then get the hell out of Dodge. I've already contacted _Requin,_ and told her to do the same."

Stubbornly, Gordon shook his red head, forgetting that his brother couldn't see him.

"The refugees, John. I have got t' help off-load these pe…"

"Let WASP handle it. They're not a target, Gordon. _You _are. Now, you'll be on your own for the ride home. 2 is… otherwise occupied. Latitude 60 degrees south is wet all the way. Long trip, but I'm certain the US Navy will be more than glad to restock you. So, shut the hell up, and _drive._ And remember, no comm till you reach the island. Good luck, and I'm out."

"John, wait…!" Nothing. All at once, 4's little cabin, ruby-lit and cramped, held nothing but engine noise, dolphin sounds and static.

"Right, then." He reached for the comm switch, to cut it off. "Good luck t' you, too, John. And it's a hell of a black eye you'll be walkin' into, whenever I get home."

_Thunderbird 3, the forward comm station-_

The evil whispers still wreathed her mind like poisoned smoke. Then, another voice spoke, from the comm, this time. Dry, Midwestern and almost bored, it was like a hand plunging down from the surface to seize a drowning child.

"Scott, TinTin… you with me? Need an answer, please. The window of opportunity's about to slam shut on our necks, here. Scott…?"

The pilot winced, made a single, pained effort to reach for the comm switch, but fell short. He could hear his brother calling him, as he'd heard Alan. And while, in his head, he responded...

_'John, I'm listening. Go ahead,'_

...All that escaped his mouth was a faint cough. The universe was tilting, darkening; Scott, himself, slipping unconscious.

"John?" TinTin called out, shakily hitting the transmit key. "Alan has not returned, Scott is injured, and I cannot hold _Kuiper! _I…"

"TinTin, _calm down._ I've already spoken to Alan. The airlock-open sequence has been triggered remotely. He and the victims are coming aboard… one of them he's had to get in a wrestling hold due tosome kind of attack... But, for the rest of _Kuiper_, use your head. There's no way 3's tractor beam could stop all that mass… but you can slow it. Also, punch in this frequency… it's a long shot, but you might be able to trigger the micro-thrusters, when the wreck's oriented properly, and slow it down further. Understood?"

Forgetting her grief and the listening whispers _(far away, helped by the girl's silence, something smiled)_ TinTin sat up and nodded. Rising, she told him,

"Yes, John. I am… as you would say… 'on it'. Please forgive my confusion, and thank you many times for advising us."

"Yeah. No problem." Then, a moment or two later, he added, "Outer hatch closed and sealed, filling airlock. Those people are going to need help, TinTin. How bad off is Scott?"

The girl was out of her seat. Unbeknownst to John, she could trigger _Kuiper's_ thrusters from anywhere aboard ship. The tractor beam, too. She knelt beside the injured pilot, even as her thoughts reached for the tumbling derelict.

"Not well, I fear. I am sedating, and administering the trauma patch."

_(Ever since the collapse of the World Unity Complex, the patches had been mass produced for use in all rescues.)_

"FAB, TinTin. You're doing fine. Just don't let the details distract you. Nine times out of ten, the answer's in the big picture."

She'd swabbed off a bit of torso, after pulling up Scott's uniform tunic. His flesh was purple beneath the tee-shirt, and hot to the touch. The patch went on, and she triggered its drug and nanobot release. It would be monitored wirelessly, by Thunderbird 3's mediscanner. In the meantime, Alan and the others needed her.

"Oui, John. I understand."

Her mind combed through _Kuiper's_ escaping tail section, fumbling for the particular bit of circuitry John had uploaded. As her thoughts brushed those of the trapped cosmonauts, she sent,

_'Courage, mes amis. Help speeds to you.'_

And… there! Still in working condition, with compressed deuterium gas in the lines. All she need do was wait for the tumbling craft to align itself with its thrusters facing away from Thunderbird 3. But…

"John?" Scott seen to, she was sprinting down the access way, now, sounding like a piece of shaken gravel in a tin can. The bulkhead comms kept pace with her, lighting up as she passed to convey John's response.

"Go ahead, TinTin."

"Suppose, if there is a spark in the wrong place, and the entire engine explodes?"

"Then they die quickly, instead of asphyxiating. You pay your money and you take your chances, TinTin. We all do. I don't know what else to tell you."

He'd never been the comforting sort, John Tracy. So, she said,

"Very well, then. Wish us bon chance, s' il-vous plait."

"Always. But you're too smart to rely on luck. You… Hang on, there's…"

_Atop the WNN New York Building, in the heliport lounge-_

Trapped in a boring, business-deco flight lounge, Cindy Taylor had been talking to her boss, Jake Hall. Dissatisfied with what he'd been getting from NASA, Jake next wanted her to fly out to the John Glenn Space Center, in Ohio. Not as far as Texas, anyway, but she really wanted to stay in New York, near the…

"Ms. Taylor?" The line had abruptly switched over; the new voice at once familiar, and slightly puzzling.

_"John…?" _She clutched the cell phone closer, then held it away again, desperately trying to punch up a video feed. No luck.

"John Tracy?"

"Yeah. Listen, I just thought… I caught one of your broadcasts and… I just wanted to tell you not to worry. Um… I've got a hell of a mess on my hands," (_Ugly as the Standard Model, actually, but when had he ever gotten to pick his emergencies?) _"…but it's being dealt with."

The reporter had stood up by now, elbowing her way through the lounge doors to the rain-washed helipad. Nick was back, his bird refueled and ready.

"John, where _are_ you?"

"Jersey."

That brought her up short and sharp. All at once, laughing and crying together, she demanded,

_"Jersey?_ John Tracy, what the hell kind of lousy karma lands you in New Jersey?" Have you been kicking the canes away from little old ladies, or something?"

He actually laughed a little, then.

"No, Ma'am. I respect my elders. Always decent with _you_, aren't I?"

"Ouch," she grinned savagely, climbing into the screaming helijet beside Nick Baldeon. "And to think, I had this beautiful, moving obituary worked up. Wouldn't have been a dry eye within broadcast range, I guarantee it. Now I'm going to have to tell the world just what a loathsome little menace you really are."

But she was still crying, and laughing, too, as Cindy gave Nick the thumbs up for take-off.

'_Safe at home, after all_,' she thought, no longer quite certain why. '_All__ of them_.'

_The other place, and terribly preoccupied-_

Only the speed and power of this 'Other-Where' had made all of this activity possible. John was doing so much at once, having so many simultaneous conversations, that the cyberscape was beginning to blur. His grasp of data was slowing, as well, a sure sign of burnout.

A speck of light in a silver ocean, tired and losing focus, he still felt the second ping… and that which came after. Someone else had come looking, this time from the Kennedy Space Center. John, a little confused as to why NASA wanted his attention _(The astronauts were all safely accounted for, after all,)_ was just about to respond.

Then, something happened. Like a tumor, a dark bulge pulsed away from the .gov node. Something black as ice and serpent-quick struck at him, launching gluey, sparking tendrils.

He should have moved, contacted another server and hopped away, placing infinity between himself and danger. Instead, worn by the speed and rush of unprotected interface, John hesitated. Something else made it through, though. Something he at first had trouble identifying. It was physical sensation, a… touch. Someone very far off had put a hand on him.

_Bright light. Noise. Smells. Temperature._ Someone caressing the back of his… neck, that was it. Terms came flooding back along with the sensory input. Someone had removed his hand from the cyberlink, and stood behind John, massaging his neck and shoulders. He could see her partial reflection on the monitor screen. Drew.

There was a sudden fierce surge, something within him fighting very hard to reach the surface. He had to steady himself before pulling away from her touch, and turning the chair.

She was… He focused on the edges, first. No more black dye. Red-gold hair, pale arms set off by a rose silk blouse… Conservative business attire. Middle management? _Damn._

The shoes looked like crocodile, but probably weren't, given Africa's complete lack of humor about poaching. Long wool skirt, in patterned grey. On upward, then, traveling past a curving landscape that had grown softer in four years, to her face.

Her eyes turned out to be light brown, almost amber, and her expression was… well, he'd never been very good at interpreting those. She didn't seem angry, though.

Drew, four years later. What, exactly, was he supposed to make of that?

She bit her lip, uncharacteristically reticent. They hadn't parted softly, or well. Then…

"Denice called me. She said you were driving her crazy, on the computer, again, every waking moment. I told her, _'typical Scorpio; cute, but devious… and he wouldn't know what to do with himself, if he wasn't plotting.'_

John remained carefully still, as though she were something that might implode, leaving nothing behind but a glow.

"You, um… aren't saying anything, Tracy. Did I interrupt something really earth-shaking?"

Well, _yes._ She had. But this mattered, too. So much that, on some level, it actually hurt to breathe.

"I just… tend to screw things up, with females," John replied slowly, not quite looking at the sudden girl. "And I don't want that to happen, this time. Not again. So, I need to know… if I said one thing that would make you…"

"Happy?" Drew supplied, her hand reaching slowly for his.

"Right. _Happy._ What, um, would it be?"

She'd caught his hand, meshed her long fingers with his. He neither resisted, nor quite responded, looking withdrawn and aloof… _unreachable_… as ever.

"Well… I suppose… if you looked at me and said something like, _'Drew, it's good to see you again. I love you, and I want you to stay.'_ That would release all sorts of oxytocin."

John considered, briefly. His head was still ringing from the effects of interface burnout, but,

"That's it? Doesn't seem difficult. Right. Drew: it's good to see you again. I…"

At the corner of his eye, something moved. Denice, pushing through the plastic-strip door. Denice, with a micro-thin smile, and a very large firearm. Her eyes had gone yellow as candle flames.

_"Go!" _John commanded, lunging from the work station chair to shove Drew out of harm's way. With his other hand, he picked up and threw DNC's cammo bomber jacket, meaning to startle, not injure.

"He won't use you if you're not near me. Get out!"

As Denice batted at the jacket, and Drew tried to argue, John yanked the pistol away. It discharged in the process, blasting a small cloud of stinging chips from the concrete wall behind them. The booming explosion was like cannon shot, like the impact of a two-by-four.

No room to maneuver. Too many valuable hostages. He had to get clear of his friends, before they got hurt.

A quick rabbit punch to the head dropped Denice. She fell into his arms. John lowered his semi-conscious hostess to the floor, then stood up again, to warn Drew. She'd gone curiously still, though. Frozen as the dead smiles in an old photograph. And Denice had ceased groaning. Could the Hood now transfix groups, as well as individuals? Confused, needing to remove the source of their danger, John backed from the cluttered room, gun still in hand. It was one of those decisions that you come to regret later, for as long as 'later' lasts. He tucked the weapon away in his waist band, safety locked.

Outside, all was as still as the shop had been, crowds frozen in mid-gesture throughout the old Trenton-East parking garage. _Weird._

Alert as a cat, John began walking. Too dangerous, here, for the people, and himself. No telling who might…

The first missile took him by surprise. A bright red fire extinguisher burst from its mounts with doubled metallic _'spongs'_, flew through the air and struck him on the back of the head. John reeled forward.

White-blind, hot-pain, warmth coursing down from his injured head. He collided with someone, a scruffy young man, who suddenly moved, driving iron-hard fingers into John's upper arms. The kid's eyes were yellow.

"Shall I tell you what I enjoy?" he taunted. John shoved him aside, breaking several of the host's fingers along with his tenacious grip.

The Princeton Tunnel, he decided. Fewer people for his enemy to use, there. A swift look around gave John his bearings. Past the big ad-pylon, then down a flight of stairs, through 'The Arsenal', lay his way out.

He started forward again, spattering blood on the concrete floor and frozen crowd. Then a shop window shattered, bowing outward like it had taken a sudden deep breath, breaking apart into an expanding cloud of hissing knives. Got hit, and hit again.

Shoulder… left side… thigh… and his arm, where he'd brought it up to shield his face. Deep and burning cuts, but others had got it worse. One woman, riddled with glass, standing only because the Hood willed it so, turned to him. She reached forward, eyes glowing in a crimsoned face.

"…the feel of hair, matted with blood…"

He snapped short the largest shards, dodging her grab with a wild sideways scramble. People fell, or turned to watch him with avid eyes. John forced himself to keep to the route, passing shops and cardboard 'houses' with all the speed he could manage. These people were only in danger because he was among them, and the Hood wanted to play.

A section of iron rebar tore free of an old concrete wheel stop, trailing a swarm of razor-edged slivers. He wasn't well able to dodge, now. Took it on the right side and elbow. Something snapped, and he was driven against a large, older man. The fellow smiled and seized him, whispering,

"…The sound of someone screaming through a gag…"

Pain from his ribs and arm were like fiery static. Hard to think, to stay oriented. He brought the other arm around, somehow remembering to make a fist. Broke the guy's jaw. No more smile.

Slipped a little, but kept going. A nightmare blizzard of flying junk… equipment, metal bits, broken lights… stuff came from so many directions that John couldn't begin to block it all. Fell repeatedly.

The last time but one, someone caught him. Another man, blue uniform.

"…the final struggles of a trapped victim…"

A sudden sharp move (his own, or the man's?) broke him away. Wished someone would come, but there was only ragged breathing, red all over the floor, flares of sudden hot impact, and the same smile, same eyes. But, the tunnel… old rusted-shut turnstile… was close, now. Almost there.

The last time, he didn't see what hit him. Yanked to his feet, John faced a blurry tan oval with slits of glowing gold. There was red and black at the edges of his vision, and sickness rose when he turned his head. Someone said, tauntingly,

"John, I believe? And what a state you're in. You've lost, you know."

The speaker leaned closer. Same pale, frozen smile and burning stare.

"My hours here are limited, child, but there remains time enough to finish _you,_ and to regain control of my operations in space, air and sea. Steer them to their proper conclusions."

Not quite. 72 hours, he recalled vaguely.

'_Distract, keep talking. Because…?'_

"Stopped you three times, already," he managed to say, "getting sort of… predictable. Rein…carnation… taken that much out of you?"

72 hours. How close?

No reason a fist should hurt more than the rest had, except that he wasn't prepared. He couldn't, not quite, pull himself upright again. Someone clutched a handful of hair and yanked his head up. Someone hissed,

"All you've ever been is a guard dog. A vicious cur chained up outside to warn the others, and tossed scraps. Not even important enough to rescue. How dreadful that must feel. Why not invite me in, to find out?"

There were noises, then; shouting and crashes. The tormenting voice stopped, and with it the pressure in his head. Dropped suddenly, he fell. Couldn't really see, but there was the pistol, still. Only, the large man was innocent… controlled. He couldn't shoot, had to somehow distract. 72 hours.

_Trenton Underground, Near the Princeton Tunnel-_

Jeff Tracy and Brains had arrived only minutes after the boys. Thunderbird 6 might _look_ like a P-51 Mustang, but she was faster than Thunderbird 2, and in the hands of a skilled pilot could cover land and sea with voracious speed.

With the storm fading like a bad dream, they made excellent time from Tracy Island to New Jersey. Then, guided over the phone by young Fermat, they'd sped to the underground, entering from the surface, by trash-strewn stairwell. (The lone elevator had long since broken down, but the regulars evidently preferred that the place seem forbidding to casual visitors.)

On the third floor, which seemed to be the computer-wares region, they encountered their first people in the form of a motionless crowd. Equally unexpected was a wave of exhaustion; a sudden, sapping drain. The insidious lassitude crept through mind and body like poisoned fog, whispering that someone else would take over, _now…_

Jeff actually slapped himself, shaking the drowsy engineer to help him stay conscious. Drifting through nightmare, they prodded one another along, Jeff finally snapping alert when they spotted the blood trail. Not much, at first, but not random, either.

Someone, attacked, had tried very hard to reach the stairs at the end of this level, traveling a fairly straight line through the shops and stalls, but falling a lot. There were handprints on the littered floor, and on vertical objects, where he'd pulled himself upright… or tried to.

Jeff began to run, Hackenbacker catching him, once, when he slipped. Ahead, they caught the sounds of a fight. A few of the shouting voices were childishly high-pitched, some of them definitely female. Reaching the shadowy stairwell, Jeff never paused, leaping steps with no grace at all, but frantic, tearing need.

He was businesslike and decisive, a sonuvabitch when he had to be; a man who found, or made, solutions. He didn't allow what he saw next to overwhelm him. He acted.

The boys, their teacher, a pair of girls, and a young man were doing their best to reach John through a tornado of flying debris. Sometimes the mutable enemy struck at them from one host, sometimes another, but always from behind.

Hackenbacker had lunged forward, but Jeff whipped him around.

"Brains, no!" He snapped. "I need you thinking, not plowing in with the others to get torn apart. _I'll _get the boys, you come up with a way to reduce the odds. Do it!"

Then, Jeff Tracy plunged into the melee, settling matters unapologetically, by dropping as many potential hosts as he could, one savage punch at a time. But, you couldn't fight something that had no body… something that came at you from everywhere at once.

Brains had pulled out his PDA. Forcing calm, he contacted the ID chips of every person present, excepting only Jeff's, the boys, his own, and that of John. Then, he broadcast a stun signal. Nothing permanent, but enough to severely reduce the Hood's potential hosts. They had to be at least a little bit conscious, you see, in order to be controlled; another of Daniel's little script changes.

The signal radiated from every machine and device in the underground, and, all at once, people collapsed as though mowed by a shock wave, shut down by the feedback from their ID chips.

Brains dropped the PDA and raced to his son, who appeared to have sustained a broken nose. Jeff went to his own boy, forgetting that there was one last host the Hood might easily take refuge in.

John's head had lifted, as he raised himself, slightly, from the floor. His eyes sparked very faintly golden, the Hood's fading power taking a final hold.

Jeff hurtled fallen college students and criminals, moving faster than he had in years. His son's voice, but twisted, and mocking…

"A last gift for you… _friend._ May it bring many happy returns."

There was a gun.


	13. Chapter 13: QED

Just a little bit of (edited) almost-wrap up...

13

_You remembered the damndest things, when you were this close to dying…_

One thing about fence-work; it paid. Kept him busy, too. John's mind was frequently in such a tumult of theory and planning that he would have found rest impossible if he hadn't worked himself into numbed insensibility.

It was a windy, ice-bright day in early June, in the rocky highlands of northern Wyoming. His father had left the week before, returning to the world of high finance and corporate intrigue, and John was out restringing a barbed-wire fence with Ken Flowers. It was a tedious process; slow, back-breaking and more than occasionally painful.

The wooden fence posts were still in pretty good shape. It didn't rain enough up here for much rot to set in. The posts had gone grey, splintered and fragrant, their bruised-needle smell reminding John of the big chest where Grandma kept her wedding finery and her spare guns. But posts weren't the problem, wire was.

Someone… hired by one of those giant, government-run 'cooperatives', maybe… had taken a pair of shears to three miles of fence, cutting the wire and releasing most of Ross's cattle. Other friends and relations had been tasked with retrieving the strayed herd. _Their_ job was the fence.

Ken held the heavy roll in his leather-gloved hands, slowly unreeling it as John stapled sharp, twisted wire to each and every post in the compromised section. They were close to the end of their fourth strand. After this, only the top row remained to be done, working back the way they'd come. The wire was hard to handle, though, sometimes springing away to slash at hands or faces, and they had to be constantly wary.

As the two boys followed the perforated fence line down a wind-scoured gulley, across a brook and up the other side (Ken's battered truck was in sight, parked beneath a stand of scrub pine), trouble struck. Walking backward, Ken turned his ankle, had to grab for a post to keep his balance, and dropped the roll of wire.

Shining, fanged coils immediately sprang free, striking like rattlesnakes. Bright-ground barbs slashed clean through Ken's jacket and plaid shirt, gashing the left side of his stomach and hip. A loose coil hissed back and slit John's arm, where he'd had it stretchedout to hold the wire taut.

_"Shit!"_ Kenneth shouted, slapping at first one cut, then another, driving the barbs deeper. _"Dammit!_ I hate this stuff!"

Ken was a big, rangy guy, brown-haired, ugly and muscular. He played football for the Wildcats, tending to react first, think later. Now, with his leaping and lunging about, he was making the situation worse, knocking John off his feet, and loosing more wire from the dropped roll.

John wriggled free of the fanged loops, clamped a hand to his sliced flesh, then got up from the stony creek bed. With the other hand (his right), he retrieved the staple gun.

"Stop jumping, and let me have a look," he said, next disentangling his friend. The older boy stopped cursing and held still. His grey eyes drilled the jagged horizon as John pulled the bloody plaid shirt out of his waistband and examined the cuts. Eight bruised and oozing punctures trailed into shallow, claw-like scratches. Messy, but nowhere as bad as it _could_ have been. Out here, job-related wounds were a fact of life, and you got used to treating all but the worst, yourself.

"How bad?" Ken asked him, worriedly.

"You'll live… but we ought to get them cleaned and patched up."

"Guess so," his partner assented morosely. "It's lunch time, anyhow. Leave this crap here, John. We'll come back for it."

The sun-faded truck wasn't far, just at the top of the nearest rise. A few minutes' scrambling over loose rock and tangled brush got them to the first aid kit. Ken had to be dealt with, first. He sat on the lowered tail gate with his back to a pile of old horse blankets, squinting upthrough pine shadow and dancing sun spears.

John prepared a betadyne mixture, then set about cleaning the ragged wounds. Stomach and hip were disinfected and bandaged with a touch that was thorough, if not particularly gentle. John had a way of making his feelings known.

"Want to quit for the day?" He asked Ken suddenly, as though it hardly mattered.

"Uh-uh," the older boy replied with a firm head-shake. "We don't finish on time, we don't get paid, an' I ain't fixin' to have you freeze up on me, again."

In Ken's experience, _nobody_ turned a colder shoulder than John Tracy, robbed of cash.

"…'Sides, Ross'll have his herd back, soon, but it won't do him no good if the fence ain't up."  
The hulking boy then saw to his friend's gashed arm, washing it clean with disinfectant before sticking the edges together with a large bandage. John hardly seemed to notice, staring off into the chilly distance, thoughts ticking over so fast that Ken could just about hear them tumble.

To make conversation and break the long silence, the older boy asked,

"Ready for lunch?"

John shook his head, fair hair falling into violet eyes. He'd forgotten to pack anything to eat, again. Grumbling...

"Keep skipping meals, like that, an' one a these days, the wind's gonna carry you clean back to Kansas,"

…Ken Flowers gave the other boy one of his own sandwiches. Ham and cheese with mayonnaise, which John liked well enough, although he at first shrugged it away.

"Go ahead an' take it. I got another, an' we can always stop at the bait shop on the way in, buy some more."

To Ken's surprise, John gave him one of those very rare 'sunshine-through-storm-clouds' smiles of his.

"Just don't order the tuna," he quipped, cocking a blond eyebrow.

Ken grinned, adding,

"Not on a slow day, anyhow. Might turn out to be the 'minnow special'."

They both laughed a bit, slouching on the rusted blue tailgate to share ham sandwiches and cold ginger ale. Hard work, sharp air and friendship made everything taste better, even the cellophanedsnack cakes. In a fine humor, despitesabatoge and accident, Ken remarked,

"Betcha heaven looks a lot like Wyomin'… 'cept without all the damn barb wire an' BLM boys."

John only shrugged, gone suddenly bleak and quiet, again. Kenneth prodded,

"You don't think?"

Another shrug, then,

"Can't say. Don't expect to find out."

Ken stopped chewing.

"What's that s'pposed to mean!" He demanded, at once worried and confused. He'd heard that there were 'godless atheists' around, and hoped his friend didn't turn out to be one of them.

By way of answer, John got off the squeaking tailgate, picked up a stick, and started scratching something in the rocky red dirt at his feet; a long string of symbols that Ken found completely indecipherable. Realizing this, John sighed, then moved over a few feet and began again, writing new words in the tossing shadows beneath a gnarled and wind-bitten pine.

"Okay. First premise: there is a Heaven. We accept this?"

"Sure," Ken replied, coming over to watch what his very odd friend was doing, half-eaten sandwich in hand. The relieved truck springs bounced and creaked in his wake.

John continued writing, making quiet points as he went.

"_Two:_ in the normal course of things, if all the literature is correct, good people go to Heaven."

Ken nodded. So he'd always been told, at least. His sandwich was gone, by now, the cold wind beginning to pick up, again.

"_Three:_ good people think good thoughts. (Sort of their trademark, as I understand it.) Point four… John _doesn't_ think good thoughts. Therefore… John isn't going to Heaven. _Quod erat demonstrandum_."

They stared at the diagram for a long moment before John finished, very quietly,

"Inescapable logic. Don't get me wrong, Ken. I'm glad there are good people out there. I just don't think I'm one of them. Too much else to worry about. Too many things to find out."

Ken scratched at his own mussed-up dark hair, his lumpy, stubbled chin, then said,

"Sounds scientific an' all, John… but where's God fit inna all this?"

His friend gestured at the top of the diagram.

"Up here, in the premise. But I don't know what he wants. He doesn't listen."

Ken snorted.

"You should talk to my mom, then. She's got 'im on speed-dial."

All at once, the big defensive end took up a stick of his own, and began making changes in the diagram. When he was done, the bottom read,

_'…John tries to do good things, there four, John might get there someday, just like everyone else.'_

(He misspelled 'therefore', but John found himself smiling a little, anyway. Ken meant well, after all, and maybe the vote of confidence mattered, somehow.)

…But the 'good things' argument was blurred just now by the smooth, cold heaviness of a gun in his hand. His left forefinger lay curved around a trigger that John vaguely recalled had been altered; filed by DNC to hair-fine sensitivity. Stroke it but lightly, and the tall figure running toward him would die, easing the terrible pressure in his head.

One shot… everything over… all debts settled. His mother's death, the baby's disappearance, the misunderstandings and lies; _paid in full._ One shot.

The whispering pressure urged him to do it, this one little motion… do it _now._ But, John had never been very cooperative. Never the ideal son, teammate, or brother. _Or _the ideal tool.

The grey-haired man rushed forward, still; seeing the gun, but not turning aside or seeking cover. He was struck, as John had been, by everything that the killing presence could throw at him; blizzards of jagged glass, tornadoes of metal and junk. Square in the cross-hairs, stillhe came on.

_'You've lost, you know,'_ the Hood had gloated, slipping like a blade into John's dazed mind, like a hand curving tight around the grip of a pistol, or a coward hiding behind a frenzied attack-dog. But guns and dogs didn't make their own decisions, any better than John Tracy obeyed instructions.

The pistol went off with a deep, angry roar, its savage recoil nearly dislocating his wrist. The cement floor in front of him all but erupted, filling the air with slivers and dust. And there, all at once, was the man, panting and bloody, but there.

_72 hours…_

Inside John's mind, something shrieked and withered. Something returned to oblivion, writhing and clawing as it went. He dropped the gun, using the arm that still mostly worked to slow his own shuddering collapse.

"Hey, Dad," John greeted the worried man.

Jeff Tracy crouched to the ground and pulled his son offof pocked and blood-stained cement.

"Hey, Tiger," he replied, thinking of other times.


	14. Epilogue: Manhunt

Minor edit. A few small wording changes...

14

_Kennedy Space Center, Florida-_

He'd looked like hell when he joined them, forgoing even food or a home phone call to meet with his gathered crew. Stepping into the computer lab (which they'd claimed… FBI, technician and all… as a sort of 'Base Camp 2'), Pete McCord had the slightly confused, unshaven pallor of a man who'd been hospitalized and medicated for weeks. He wore a white tee-shirt, blue draw-string sweatpants, and a shadowed expression that began to lift from the moment the crew regrouped.

Linda's hand had flown to her mouth at the sight of this curiously lightless and hollow-cheeked Pete. Then, like the others, she rushed to the mission commander.

He stood perfectly still, at first, numb amid all the pats, the embraces and friendly shoulder-punches. Then, Pete gave what remained of his flight crew a fierce, awkward hug.

"It's all true, then…" he murmured aloud. "For awhile, there…"

But, Commander McCord hadn't rested back in the hospital, when his only visitors, the only people who believed him, were a local Salvation Army unit. He wasn't about to quit now. Instead, he counted heads, and came up short.

"Listen," Pete said urgently to Linda, Cho and Roger, pushing them away. "Glad as I am to see you people again, we're missing someone, and I need every man accounted for."

Roger Thorpe nodded, replying,

"We've been looking, Skipper. For _both _of you, until Gene told us you were hopping a space-A back to the Cape. Macy's still at it, over there."

(From his busy computer station, the lab technician gave them all a distracted wave. He'd been recruited, and then some.)

Like the rest of the Ares III crew, Thorpe retained a vague, slippery image of John Tracy; _their_ John Tracy.

…but it was beginning to fade.

Pete's blue eyes had grown firm, again. He might not be much taller than the ladies, but every inch of the man was astronaut,aviator and Naval Commander.

"Good. Keep at it. Before we do anything else, though, I want each of you to go to separate areas of the room, get yourselves something to write with, and detail everything you recall about the mission. _Everything_ and _everybody._ No recollection too minor. No conversation, either, until you've written it all down, and we meet to compare notes. Once we've gotten a consensus on who it is we're looking for, we can start making plans."

"But, Pete," Dr. Bennett objected, her brown eyes troubled, _"Why?_ We haven't got time to waste jotting down witness statements. Not when we've lost… lost…"

"John," Kim Cho supplied for her, after a long, fumbling moment. No one questioned McCord's orders a second time. Time, and memory, were slipping.

The sandy-haired mission commander dispatched Agent Rutherford (Rance, now; like Macy Calhoun, he was fast becoming a friend and fellow conspirator) to fetch pencils and coffee.

Pete had pulled a number of creased papers from one of his own pockets. The work of many sleepless nights, it was; with the visits, all that had kept him sane.

"Believe me," he said, frowning round at tall Marine, small doctor and slim, pretty exobiologist, "we're going to need something to fall back on, here. It may sound crazy, but the universe seems to be trying to erase John Tracy. The C-120 flight crew didn't have a clue who I was talking about… But, something here, some situation, won't quite let it happen. Not completely. Not yet."

No one thought he was crazy. Linda bit her lip, one hand pressed to her flat belly. _She _knew what the anchor was, the fraying lifeline (despite radiation and contraceptive, maintained by the doings of a certain computer) that tethered John. After all, the little one couldn't exist, if its father didn't.

Everyone had noticed the gesture, just as Cho had read the medical file. Linda's shoulders began to shake, but Pete cut her off by thrusting a pencil and stack of paper at her. Rutherford had returned, having burglarized a nearby office with business-like stealth. The FBI was _always_ prepared.

"None of that, Doctor," Pete told her, firmly. "We're bringing him back."

Linda gave him the ghost of a smile, remembering an old argument.

"Is that your _professional_ opinion, Commander McCord?" she half-joked, one hand cupped protectively over the baby, a mere blob of cells, but already worth defending with everything she had.

"Damn right, it is!" McCord snapped. "We don't quit flying till we're out of the 'missing man formation'. Everyone comes home."

It wasn't just a flight crew, anymore. It was a family.


End file.
